The Scoop on Poop
October 31, 2013 8:38 PM   Subscribe

 
That is a long article, and I've only skimmed it so far, but I've got to say - that's an awful lot of times using the word "shit".
posted by Curious Artificer at 8:47 PM on October 31, 2013 [1 favorite]


well, it kind of is an article that is explicitly about shit
posted by titus n. owl at 9:54 PM on October 31, 2013


But the toilet still functions under a cloud of suspicion, blamed for the waste of water which could, presumably, be used for other matters, like watering a fig tree in one’s yard, under which one might have also placed the nourishing placenta of one’s first-born in order to complete the circle of life.

Ho there, Mr. Speaker-of-Truth, you might be growing a straw man with all that poop.
posted by JHarris at 10:11 PM on October 31, 2013 [2 favorites]


Yeah, I mean it could also be used for drinking and keeping people alive.
posted by Justinian at 1:24 AM on November 1, 2013 [1 favorite]


well, it kind of  is an article that is explicitly about shit

No shit
posted by y2karl at 3:50 AM on November 1, 2013


If we could just get the 2.6 billion or so people who have no sanitation to go live up in remote mountain regions, a lot of excrement could be safely spread where high intensity UV could help break it down, and the liquid components could safely run downhill, for a long time. Of course, that would make their hard lives even harder, and the additional selection pressures of such environments could make for a brutal decline in their populations in the early years, but conceptually, for a problem of this magnitude, you've got to think not only big, but up hill.

It's the concentration of poop near habitable land and water resources, not the absolute amount of it, that is the current problem in a lot of places.
posted by paulsc at 3:51 AM on November 1, 2013 [1 favorite]


For anyone interested in a practical alternative to human waste management, I highly recommend The Humanure Handbook: A Guide to Composting Human Manure. I found it to be quite an eye-opener and worth reading even if you have no immediate plans to take your toilet off the grid.
posted by fairmettle at 4:47 AM on November 1, 2013


That's disgusting. I don't do that. Right now. While I'm typing this on my phone. Yuck. That would be gross.
posted by clvrmnky at 5:17 AM on November 1, 2013 [3 favorites]


my adolescence was confused by people telling me to get my shit together and to not shit bricks.

really.
posted by Colonel Panic at 5:36 AM on November 1, 2013


Scatological man, totally scatological.
posted by sammyo at 5:48 AM on November 1, 2013


I took a class in college called Comedy: Text and Theory. It was, and is, one of the most sought after classes in one of the largest universities in the country.
We spent 4 hours (two lectures) on why shit was funny. It boils down to: shitting is the great-leveler of the world. How many times have you thought of Barack Obama or George W. Bush making a hurty poop-face? Well you have now and you smiled, didn't you?
posted by mfu at 5:49 AM on November 1, 2013 [3 favorites]


It wasn't until I got involved in (a) primitive camping and (b) Alzheimer's patients that I truly appreciated the importance of body waste management. It's easy to joke about but damn it, that shit is real.
posted by kinnakeet at 5:59 AM on November 1, 2013 [2 favorites]


Great article. I'm lucky enough to live in Maine, where my water comes from a clean lake, and needs only minimal treatment. I'm often appalled at the chemical taste of water in other places. I have a septic system, so I have to be aware of what happens to my shit, wastewater, toilet paper, etc. I'm a parent, so, yeah, babies poop a lot, and you have to deal.

When ask.me was new, there were several questions about pooping; they were informative and often hilarious. People don't talk about poop because it's, understandably, a taboo product, and therefore a taboo subject. So, an article that talks really plainly about shit, that calls it shit, is a major taboo breaker. Thanks for posting it.
posted by theora55 at 6:43 AM on November 1, 2013


....Okay, let me first explain what I was just doing Googling the phrase "Dr. Toilet."

That is because on a flight I took this summer, I was browsing through one of the in-flight entertainment channels on Virgin America and one of them was a whole series of short documentaries about different scientific/social/political/cultural innovators; and one of them was about this doctor, who I can't recall whether he was Chinese or Japanese, who has made it his mission to try to improve toilet access in other countries; he considers it would be the single biggest improvement for the general health of a lot of the developing world, and is trying to really get to the, er, bottom of sanitation access around the world. In some places there are social and logistical issues at play; I remember one bit where he was talking about how one argument against toilets he ran into was that some people actually preferred the social potential for open-air crapping, and said they wouldn't like a stall where you couldn't see the other people in the bathroom with you. I think he just said he was working on a public restroom where the walls were low enough for you to see the guy in the stall next to you and you could chat while you went about your business. He made no bones about the fact that his nickname was "Dr. Toilet", and I think that's what the title of this film was.

But instead, I came upon this other article, which I am trying to figure out whether it is actually true or if someone has watched way too many episodes of "Scrubs."
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 8:31 AM on November 1, 2013


You know, I'm getting a little annoyed by 'poo' and 'poop.' I don't mind 'shit' and I don't mind 'bowel movement' or 'defecation,' but it seems like in the past 5 years or so the adult world suddenly took 'poop' over from the six-year-olds, and I'm not really sure why.
posted by frobozz at 9:02 AM on November 1, 2013


I use it because it's a funny word. That's also why six-year-olds use it, but no one really owns words.
posted by JHarris at 12:06 PM on November 1, 2013 [1 favorite]


Wait so the guy who just sold me "perendinate" for ten bucks was a fraud?
posted by invitapriore at 1:14 PM on November 1, 2013 [1 favorite]


frobozz: "You know, I'm getting a little annoyed by 'poo' and 'poop.' I don't mind 'shit' and I don't mind 'bowel movement' or 'defecation,' but it seems like in the past 5 years or so the adult world suddenly took 'poop' over from the six-year-olds, and I'm not really sure why."

The Tea Party elected them to places where their words get requoted a lot.
posted by IAmBroom at 3:31 PM on November 1, 2013


The truth is that the flush toilet is the single greatest human invention responsible extending the disease which is human life. That includes antibiotics and all the other advances you might suppose to be major factors. Shit takes a relatively long time to break down, and humans produce a lot. Without toilets humans would be buried in shit in a matter of weeks. Shit should be an environmental factor limiting the spread of human being. The toilet's effect of prolonging human life increase the tumor load of disease on the planet earth. If you free your mind from the brainwash, you will see flush toilets are helping to destroy the rainforest.
posted by Lrn24gt at 6:17 PM on November 1, 2013


Oh please Lrn24gt.
posted by JHarris at 6:52 PM on November 1, 2013


Oh hai anarcho-primitivism!
posted by Countess Elena at 6:57 PM on November 1, 2013


I never stopped saying "poop" because BM is what we use for record-keeping, not something you say and I can only hear "feces" in Daffy Duck's voice.
posted by MsDaniB at 7:04 PM on November 1, 2013 [1 favorite]


*hyperbolus and a rimshot*
posted by y2karl at 11:51 PM on November 1, 2013


Ah! I had it wrong - he wasn't "Dr. Toilet", he was Mr. Toilet!
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 4:15 AM on November 2, 2013


Wait, 26 comments and I'm really the first to think an FPP about shitting posted by "porn in the woods" is eponysterical?
posted by Hal Mumkin at 10:58 AM on November 2, 2013


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