Toilet paper and its various uses

Toilet paper can prove very useful at times. It is no hidden secret that a lot of people (including myself) use it as tissue paper sometimes and wipe our faces and other various body parts. It can also prove a useful writing surface. Les 120 journées de Sodome was written on toilet paper (photo of the mansucript above). In such cases, thick toilet paper proves a blessing.

Howrah Station

I must give a big thumbs-up to Howrah station maintenance workers for keeping the loo (both peeing and shitting, and for both men and women) in good condition. It's not perfect but considering the amount of traffic it handles, the loos near the food plaza are good.

On a similar note, Sealdah gets a big thumbs-down for having crappy crapping places.

The loo at 8B bus stand is to be avoided except by peeing men. The loos in the JU engineering buildings are far better. On that note, which are the best loos in the JU engineering areas?

JUDE Loos for Women: Before and After

This is what the women's loo at JUDE, recently refurbished and never maintained after that, looked like when I attacked it on the 23rd of December with Harpic and a loo brush.



This is what it now looks like. However, four of the five cubicles have defects, the worst being the fourth from the door which is not draining, The second from the door also produces interesting fountain effects when flushed: stand well back. The first leaks into the pot, the third has a detached seat. For all of these I will write a letter of complaint to the Estate Maintenance office.

People have been pushing the limits of loo use by for eg puking in the basins and (I suspect) shoving stuff where it shouldn't go. I want people to monitor and report regularly on the state of this loo. We need to make sure the official cleaning staff are doing their job as well as users behaving properly.

To be fair to the cleaners, the loos hadn't been properly cleaned since they were made and were covered in a layer of cement waste, which captures dirt and isn't amenable to ordinary cleaning. There's still some of it left on the floor outside the cubicles, making the tiles gritty.

Now all cubicles have plastic mugs as of yesterday: I will be watching to see how long they take to get stolen. In the meantime, we need fun notices saying the following things. Our celebrated loo artists who last struck during the BA admissions could please come up with suitable artwork.

PLEASE DO NOT PUKE IN THE BASINS. Use the loos. They are there for both ends of you.
PLEASE THROW ALL SANITARY WASTE IN THE BIN BY THE DOOR. Loos will choke on them and drown you on the next flush.
PLEASE DO FLUSH. Be nice.
PLEASE DON'T GO ON THE FLOOR UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES. Never mind what you do at home.
PLEASE DO NOT WALK AWAY WITH THE MUGS. They cost Rs 12 each. If you are desperate we'll have a whip-round and buy you one.

***
OK, do me these in English and Bangla and we'll laminate them and put them up.

The most scenic loos in the world

This appeared in the Independent recently:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/a-loo-with-a-view-the-worlds-most-scenic-lavatories-962692.html

My First Colonic

Same Shit. Different Day.

So yesterday I finally went for my first colonic - otherwise known as Colon Hydrotherapy, Colon Irrigation, Colon Cleansing, Intestinal Mucosoid Plaque Removal, Glorified Enema or Deluxe Assisted Water-Up-The-Ass Crap. (Thanks, George Carlin. R.I.P.)

It was at a pretty swish place just 15 mins away (5 on a Sunday morning); the building, housing a medical research centre and presumably fairly busy on weekdays, was empty save for a flea-ridden mongrel curled up at the locked main doors at 9:50am this Sunday. I found a side entrance open, took the elevator up to the 9th floor and found The Colon Therapy Centre.

The place was small but seemed clean and calm, with friendly female staff (’certified colon therapists’: imagine that going down with your high-school career counselor) and requisite vanilla-spa pan-pipe music. I was welcomed with a quick smile and jumped straight to the Fill Out These Forms stage, certifying that I was not a patient of Heart Disease or Hemorrhoids, did not suffer from Rheumatoid Arthritis, Depression or Suicidiality as far as I could tell, that I’d had Eczema and stitches on my head in the past, that I did not consume Alcohol daily but did drink coffee 5 times a week (ok I lied a bit - these forms make you feel like such an unhealthy loser. maybe i *do* suffer from mild depression. and there was this one time when… anyways), and that I thought I didn’t get enough fresh air or exercise in my day, and I could do with several kilos off my body. Most importantly, I read the paragraph stating that I’d been explained all the risks and contraindications for this Treatment (I had not - the receptionist had only asked over the phone the day before whether I’d ever had abdominal surgery), that the procedure had been outlined to me clearly (not beyond my own research online at home the night before) and all my questions answered to my satisfaction (I wasn’t given the chance), and that if by some chance my colon exploded or my pancreas dissolved and I died in the process, the Centre took no responsibility whatsoever. I signed on the dotted line below.

My therapist Zarin, who was hovering nearby with a big smile waiting for me to finish, politely snatched up the clipboard & pen and led me straight into one of the 3 treatment rooms. It was clean, modern-looking and the aromatherapy candle made it smell pleasant and relaxing, like a massage room rather than a House of Poo. There was a screen between the door and the Poo Basin, ensuring that if anyone walked in they wouldn’t be staring straight at you lying on your back shitting with a tube up your ass.

The Poo Basin itself looked like an elevated bathtub with a hole cut out in the middle, attached to a large box that housed the triple-filtration machines and temperature controls for the water, along with the waste drainage system. From the bottom of the Basin into the drainage box ran a wide, clear plastic tube, lit from below with a mirror positioned over it at a 45-degree angle so that I could see the contents of the tube from my lying-down position atop the Basin.

After a quick explanation from Zarin (Filtration system. Temperature control. Flow speed control. Water pipe. Disposable one-time-use sterile nozzle. Lubricant. Your Ass Goes Here. Magazines. Tummy massager. Emergency bell & flow stop buttons. Sprayer & tissues to clean up. I’ll keep checking on you every few minutes.), I undressed from the waist down, hopped up onto the Basin (well, “climbed up gingerly” is more like it: I was paranoid I’d slip and fall right onto the nozzle and jam it accidentally up my rectum), covered myself with the Token Discretion Sheet, attempted and failed to insert the lubricated nozzle, and pushed the bell for Zarin. She snapped on latex gloves, told me to relax - you can NEVER relax when someone tells you to; must be some kind of ancient defensive evolutionary strategy - and with brief, mild discomfort inserted the nozzle correctly. It really isn’t that wide or long or unpleasant at all, actually. It also helps that of late I’ve been more open to experimentation with that orifice. Anyways, back to the point.

She started the water flow, and this was probably the weirdest sensation of the whole ordeal, although it lasted only for a few seconds: water slightly cooler than body temperature rising up through the initial stretches of my colon. It was a bit cold and even ticklish at first, but my body adjusted quickly. Very soon, I felt the urge to ‘expel’, as it’s called, and with Zarin’s encouragement, did. Initially it was just water coming out, clear, as it hadn’t reached up very far yet (all this I was observing with great fascination in the mirror in front of me). Apparently the nozzle is such that no Stuff or liquid flows back down into it; it remains inserted, pushing water up; the anus expands enough to expel stuff around the nozzle into the basin below. Weird. But true.

And so it continued, with intermittent bouts of debris-expulsion alternating with clear water flow. I was too fascinated looking at the stuff coming out to be overly concerned with the waves of peristalsis that were sweeping through my insides. I played around with the tummy-massager for a bit - but got distracted by thoughts of using it as a vibrator in lower regions - so eventually put it away and went back to massaging my abdomen with my hands, like Zarin showed me.

She kept popping in at regular intervals to check on me, and seemed pleased with how I was doing. The feeling of slight embarrassment was mine and mine alone; I guess she’s seen enough by now so that more shit from another asshole was nothing to write home about.

I guess I should explain why I wanted to do this in the first place; the best I can do is that I’ve been keen on it for a while, and wanted to see if there really was all this gunk lodged way up in my intestines that was clinging to the sides and wouldn’t come out on its own. For all the naysayers: my experience was above-average; there was a fair amount of ‘debris’ that I’m pretty sure wouldn’t have come out in my morning dump that day or 3 days from then. The stuff at the top, that came out towards the end, was also of a much darker colour and compressed, stringy consistency. Also, I didn’t do this in conjunction with any special diet of liquids/juices/supplements, psyllium husk or bentonite clay drinks, so whatever came out wasn’t influenced by the intake of stuff outside of my regular diet.

10 litres of water later, the whole thing was over and done. I cleaned up and dressed quickly, feeling good but not insanely high or converted to the cult or anything. Another clipboard session (this time it was the Feedback Form) along with a small cup of green tea out in the reception area, quick tips on what I should eat for the rest of the day (live-culture yogurt, non-oily, non-spicy, home-cooked vegetarian food) and shouldn’t (raw veggies and fruit), paid for my session and I was outta there.

As I got crossed the road to my car, I saw a Cute Guy getting out of his, clearly headed to the Colon Centre, and it cracked me up inside to think of a hypothetical future dinner party conversation: “So where’d you two meet?” “At the Colon Therapy Centre” / “While getting our asses cleansed”. I think I giggle-snorted out loud.

I got into the car and drove straight to the bookstore near my house, where there was a sale going on, and not only found the book I was looking for (probably the first time this has happened to me in this store), but 5 others as well as a 5-rupee coin. A special day indeed. And as I headed home with my clean colon and new books, it occurred to me that the shitty state (ha) my relationship is in at the moment (like it has been in so many other moments) was like having a colonic without the drainage system: I’m getting it up the ass and surrounded by a pool of shit, and it’s useful to me only as long as I can get the shit out of my system, get off the nozzle and walk away.

I’m going to be making shit jokes for next several days.

disambiguation

found this a few days back while surfing random blogs. now that i've conveniently forgotten which blog i've taken this off, and hadn't remembered to note down the location either... i can't provide any detail =( but this board actually exists somewhere, as i remember this being part of someone's travel photographs. (yeah, but if i wasn't a voyeur, would you have come across this beauty? :P)

also, to all fellow GLG members, happy new year. (2008, yes? first post, yes?)

And now for something completely different...

Scatology and the Sacred in Milton's Paradise Lost

• kent r. lehnhof ^{1 1}CHAPMAN UNIVERSITY

• ¹CHAPMAN UNIVERSITY

Abstract

In his classic study, The Dialectics of Creation, Michael Lieb foregrounds the myriad ways in which Milton uses scatology throughout Paradise Lost to describe the depravity of the devil. But Satan is not the only character in the epic to be associated with excretion. Milton's angels and Milton's God are also implicated in the operations of the lower bodily stratum. In these instances, however, allusions to the evacuative functions attest to an exalted divinity rather than a disgusting diabolism. Evacuation in Paradise Lost is thus a highly complex signifier. Not simply a pejorative pointing inevitably at a damnable degradation, scatology can also signal a sublime goodness. This essay draws upon humoral theory and socio-cultural studies of manners to both emphasize and account for the richly multivalent meaning of evacuation in Milton's epic.