By: staniel
[2002-05-29]
Toilets of Missouri
Now with Filler Contest!
I recently moved to Kansas City, which, contrary to popular belief, is mostly (at least the non-ghetto parts) in Missouri. In addition,
sally lives about 15 miles away in Independence (home of the giant tower the
Community of Christ built for Jesus to land on come the Day of Reckoning), and I've had a few opportunities to sample the plumbing in Independence and in the surrounding areas. By the way, the Community of Christ are basically
Mormons who rethought a few of their
less popular practices.
So these toilets, they're not so great. My tiny studio apartment is equipped with a tankless commercial toilet, which isn't that bad. The toilets in sally's apartment, on the other hand, require two to three flushings at intervals of half an hour to fully remove any er, matter that's collected inside. At first I thought Missouri toilets so often contained waste because people here were used to septic tanks and the wait-before-flushing philosophy of their operation, but in fact the stuff had been flushed, then resurfaced and was awaiting another attempt.
The local powder-room equipment roused my ire further in a tiny storefront with a blasting air vent over the table I occupied. Debby's Diner serves pleasant food, but when you step back into the men's room (clearly a former and probably current janitorial closet, judging by the mop and bucket stationed therein) you are presented with a dirty toilet. On the opposite wall, about a foot and a half away, there is a urinal in a similar state of dishevelment. As little sense as it makes to have two such fixtures in a space too small, personal and lacking in partitions to allow them to be used simultaneously (except perhaps by a person seated on the toilet aiming at the urinal), the worst horror is to the right.
Do you remember
cloth towel dispensers? I don't, because I was born after the Vietnam War. Debbie's Diner does, though! The concept was explained to me as I sat, hands still dirty, and awaited the check. Apparently you are supposed to wash your hands normally, rotate the crank on the side until you find a clean patch on the loop of cloth, and upon that dry your hands. Unless there's a miniature washing machine, dryer, and plenty of bleach stored inside the dispenser, I'm not about to trust it.
As for the contest, I cannot promise you Petey paraphenalia, nor can I promise Winking Lizard sauce. I'll come up with something in the unlikely event that someone actually completes this scavenger hunt successfully, and maybe if something interesting is found in the attempt. What I basically want is this: the contents of the site that existed at http://paranoia.com/~pathetic during the summer of 1995. The
Web Archive doesn't go back that far, but you can use it as a guide to what Paranoia was (it held a few H/P/A sites and the infamous
Why Christians Suck, as well as some other
Cult of the Dead Cow type story archives.
The Patheticism Page, as I believe it was called, hosted a few short stories written by an angsty teenager who liked Sunny Day Real Estate. This description would usually indicate a whiny indie rocker, but somehow the stories didn't suck. "A Short Note To Mr. Fowler" was the best of them. I still have it but am leery of posting someone else's content here without permission. If I get enough requests we'll see about hosting it here without featuring it as an article, I guess.
Addendum: much as I hate cloth towel dispensers, I do miss powdered soap dispensers.
a common feature of german toilets, and a specific feature of my personal apartment toilet, is a large porcelain shelf directly in the center of the bowl. someone told me this little display shelf is for pseudo-medical stool "inspection" purposes. i imagine turn-of-the-century german parents gathering around the water closet with their little monocles and sternly noting the precise color and density of little Adolf's poo.
whatever the reason, it's sick and wrong, and your shit sits there like an art exhibit until you flush, at which point it takes a refreshing little flume ride into the actual watery section of the toilet. i hate it. it turns taking a dump from the pleasant, wholesome american "taking the cosby kids for a swim" into a shame-filled, stench-ridden dog-like turd pileup. no wonder freud came up with those insane ideas about anal retention -- i wouldn't want to take a crap if i were a subject of the Austro-Hungarian empire, either. weird toiletted fuckers.
sorry for the length of this comment but dammit i hate my toilet.
That's cos real men are naturally curious; They want to know, for example, is that bit of blue baling twine they ate by accident yesterday digestible, or have they got worms. Also, the log dives off the shelf in a most elegantly diverting manner. In fact, if you want a real bog, it's not actually impossible to get them in Germany. They seem more popular in the north though, for some reason.
Post my rant next! Mine!(!!!)
That was beautiful, Alptraum.
I think that every WC should have a bidet, although not everyone seems to want to use them in the same way. Once when traveling with two Norwegian girls and a Mexican lunatic, the Mexican guy used the bidet to wash his socks. The continuous cloth towel roll is very unsanitary. Bar soap has been found to support at least eight kinds of bacteria, so that's not good. I don't like those little soap scrapers that shave off bits of bar soap, nor the powdered soap dispensers because sometimes they become damp and refuse to dispense. There is a kind of hand cleaner that the garages use that feels good and works well, but it smells like bananas and brake fluid. There's a similar kind that smells like oranges, but it has bits of abrasive in it and doesn't feel as good as the banana hand cleaner. At least in Missouri there are plenty of corn cobs.
my german toilet is even worse than normal. not only does it barely flush with enough velocity and water volume to get the piss off of the shelf, but i share the bathroom with 5 men. The two guys from Afghanistan leave behind such an incredibly toxic smell you wouldn't believe, and the two guys from Myanmar are apparently blind because they routinely piss on the toilet seat, on the outside of the toilet and on the floor.
Ah, the Third World! Don't you just love it?
i aim to please. and for the shelf.
that was just the tip of the fecal iceberg, i could go on for days about les mouvements des bowels. and don't get me started on hair clogs in the shower drain.
Go ahead, wax poetic! On the other hand, if there was any waxing going on, there would be a lot less hair in the damned shower drain!
Reading this installment while eating meatloaf (as I just was) is not recommended.
That would be a worthy submission.
Why so many English-speaking expats in Germany? If I were to go live someplace where they speak foreign, I would check out France first for that 30 hour maximum work week.
There was a bar in Vancouver, BC that had a urinal made from the wall out of the garage where they had the St. Valentines Day Massacre, with bullet holes and blood. They had put glass over it. It was sort of cool to piss on that wall. There was ice in the trough, too.
well, there are more ties to the US here than in, say, france because we basically rebuilt the country after 1945 and there are still a lot of US bases here.
and as churchill (or somebody who was always spouting future famous quotes) said, "the germans are always either at your neck or at your feet". in the german view americans are kind of the top of the totem pole so there are good jobs teaching business english, it's not so hard to get residence permits, etc. here. i personally came for the beer, i stayed for the unrelenting humorlessness and palpable stench of despair.
Also, If you a get a job with Volkswagen, you only have a 30 hour week as well.
germans' reputation as hard workers is undeserved. they just manage to make everything in life SEEM like hard work because they're so joyless. in bavaria there is a holiday every week in may. in fact today is a holiday. everything's closed. germans are efficient, but most of that efficiency is spent in planning their next vacation, or figuring out how many years of paid maternity leave they are entitled to
And if you're not Jewish, they might even pay you!
You will find a Word .doc version of the story in question
here.
because i love poop related discussions of all kinds (I used to have a skater tshirt that said i love poo) I now love kaiser alptraum. I was going to do a one panel comic called poo illustrated that would feature a different true life poop story every week but i cant draw.
except you can draw, a lot
I can draw one thing. half a face from the front. i cannot draw poop or anything else.
WHY ARE YOU AWAKE NOW?
for me to poop on! i like that the word kaiser is just a version of "caesar". tsar too. it's cool that one man's name could become a synonym for 'emperor' known around the world. c-section in german is "Kaiserschnitt". i mean, um, poop.
There's a place in New Orleans. They don't call it the Rising Sun, they call it the Taqueria Corona. When you walk into the men's bathroom the first thing you see is the toilet. It's up on a sort of makeshift dais, up three or four steps. It's elevated so close to the ceiling there's no way you could stand upright next to it, you'd have to move down a couple of steps. Someone tried to build a stall around the toilet but they never got around to putting a door on it. So if you sit on it you're about three feet higher than everyone else, and if someone opens the door everyone in the dining area can see you there, pooping. The overall impression is that it's literally a throne, overlooking some pathetic scatological empire. I don't think I could poop there.
I finally have a reason to visit New Orleans. That and throwing rocks at vampire novelists.
What bar? Is that "was" as in "When I was there", or "It is no longer there"?
yeeah that toilet description is perfect! i searched in vain for a visual aid but i got bogged down in the german version of home depot and after ten minutes figured it was time to shit or get off the pot. i guess i was going about it ass backwards.
Jonas, your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to find the St. Valentines Massacre Urinal. I think that it was in Gastown, but I'm not 100% on that either. I'm sure that the wall wouldn't be destroyed, because it's a collector's item, a memento mori. I would bet that asking a few bartenders in Gastown would lead you to the right bar, or news thereof.
Sally, back in grade 12 a friend of mine became very excited over a piece of his poo that bubbled--so much so that he grabbed my agenda and illustrated it, as well as his reaction.
Poo bubble
Also, flipping through old agendas has made me realize how grateful I am that I graduated before Columbine.
Library
also what is an agenda, is it like a business plan? if so, can I punch you like
thor?
It's a roll, and there's a take-up roll for the used part. Sane people would install a clean roll when it has cycled, but perhaps Debbie's is sufficiently eccentric to just swap the take-up roll back to the dispensing end.
Oh, and the reason for the crappy toilets is stupid Missouri plumbing codes, as the toilets are pretty much the same toilets as everywhere else.
Seems you can no longer piss on the St. Valentine's Day Massacre wall. You can buy it, though:
http://www.prairieghosts.com/valentine.html
Haunted bricks! That would account for much.
There was a mention of "Ed the Happy Clown" on Poppy Z. Brite's site, so I searched for that title, and amongst the stuff fetched was Talky Tina Press!
The Germans aren't going to tell the Yanks that they are sitting backwards on the throne.
An agenda's what we get in high school and university to write down important dates like exams, and read motivational study tips, as well as have a handy guide to the school and its faculty, programs, telephone numbers, etc. I employed much red ink back in high school in those things. You can punch me if you can find me.
Jacques, I will find another wall in Gastown to piss on. Probably one in the Blarney Stone, or the Aztec.
I have a hidden agenda.
Well, at least the Commodore is still there. I wonder if Le Chat Noir is still in Gastown? Or the Oompah? Or #5 Orange? Canadians often put brightly coloured hockey pucks in their
pissoirs.
In my day (and country) agendas were called timetables. We first got them in secondary school and until then I had never realised that things in school followed any sort of coherent plan. After eight years I'd just about grasped that we tended to have the same subjects on the same day of the week, but beyond that it was a mystery. I thought it just depended on the whim of the teacher.
The enlightening discussion about German toilets got me thinking about a professor I had for anthropology in college, who specialized in German studies (she was German) and specifically in notions of cleanliness and contamination. She never mentioned these damn toilets once, which I find a glaring omission in her consideration of German scatological errata.
Now free-associating in an anthropological mode, I was also reminded of a few toilets I had seen in Italy, in a monastary, which were like the descriptions of Indian toilets described to me by an ex-girlfriend and current friend who has family ties there. In short, you squat over them, and they are like nothing so much as a finely crafted porcelain hole with ridged foot-plates. So in the interest of a serious consideration of the culturally specific ways we dispose of waste, I bring you
this pseudo-anthropological article on changing toilets in Japan, this
retrofit to turn your "sitter" toilet into a "squatter" (found on the
Resources section of poopreport.com,) and a company which makes Indian, western, and HYBRID toilets,
Pragati Sales. BTW, a
search for "Indian toilets" on Yahoo yields a whole bunch of warnings for the timid western traveller as well as a crowning touch, the
Sulabh International Museum of Toilets.
we didnt have agendas or a good education. you must be canadian.
I have ulterior mopeds.
Better mileage than an anterior pudenda.
I bet that in Missouri they don't pronounce it, "terlit."
No, in Missouri they pronounce it "shitter."
A Brit expat in Dusseldorf explained the proper procedure for using a shit shelf toilet. If you have to go nummer zwei, you first lay two folded pieces of toilette papier on the shelf. This allows the displayed product to be flushed without leaving any skid marks to clean away.
The common explanation I got for this peculiar design was that the german diet is largely pork based. This led to a need to inspect ones daily production for worms. Now that most pigs are grain-fed and not garbage fed, this reduces the need for the shit shelf toilet.
I found them mostly in older public buildings, especially Deutche Telecom facilities.
Raymond
