Poo Log

i once had a friend named shelby, one of the few people who internet stalking, unfortunately for me since she was rad, does not turn up. she liked to play 'what if some crazy shit' quite a lot.  and she was good at it.  two of the ones that have always stuck with me follow.  only the second has to do with bathrooms.  don't get confused! (feel free to answer in the comments though, if you wish.)

what if...

• 1.  ...you come home and your roommate is having sex, and you can hear them.  they don't know you're home.  then you realize that their sex partner is calling them by your name, and they are calling their sex partner by your love interest's name. they are roleplaying YOU.
  
  how would you feel?  what would you do?
  
  
• 2. ...your roommate is away, and you need a pencil or some other innocuous thing that you think you might be able to find in their desk without being intrusive.  what you find in their desk is a stack of notebooks, all titled [your name]'s Poops. they're logs of all of your trips to the bathroom: sounds you made, smells, whether you pooped, other details.  and the logs go back to when you first moved in together.
  
  what, if anything, would you do?
  

which brings me to the Poo Log (double entendre, i'm assuming, intended).

poo log.  a record keeper.

when you're psyched on your poo, you call your journal 'baby'

available from Herbivore, the Poo Log is more than just a journal with toilets on the cover.  it actually helps you keep track of your poops by providing a ratings scale, dubbed the PQI (Poo Quality Index).

but lest you think you the Poo Log will constrain the creative interpretation of your poop, or try to fit your square poop through a round hole, see that the facing page provides a bit more free form area to fill out, including space for a sketch*.

put your name at the top, so you can share the Log and compare your logs..

the main problem i see with the Poo Log, for me, is simply that it seems like a kind of while-you-poo activity.  once i'm done, i'm kinda done.  but if you like to talk about your poops, and people plug their ears and yell 'tmi', or if your listeners are saddened that you don't remember the details and don't have any sketches, this journal might be just the thing for you!

*do not sketch with poo.  your pages will stick together.  and that's gross.  though some down on it's luck medical laboratory might be able to sell a few of these with some kind of poop sample pack and a postage paid envelope for hard core poop geeks to get real feedback.  synergy!

bathroom buzz

asylum.com has an article outlining "urinals we most want to pee in", which includes several old and gigantic urinals (over 6 feet tall!) but also these single person bathrooms at Bar 89.  i haven't been there, but my friend frank was just telling me about them.  the doors are clear glass when it's unlocked, but once you log the door the 'fog over' so people can't see in.  i don't understand how that works.  maybe double panes of glass and the fog is inside?  maybe magic.  either way, as they say at bucketheadland, neato neato.  

check this out folks. i found this photo in a craigslist apartment ad for my neighborhood. i saw something like this a while back on apartment therapy or something. it's actually kind of totally brilliant, but damned if it isn't ugly. and odd. and the door implies the bathtub is somewhere else in the apartment. not a totally uncommon thing in nyc where the kitchen bathtub can be appealingly quaint (especially in a place described as a 'tenement'), but for 1700 dollars, it seems a little, um, inappropriate.  makes me wonder about the deregulation of the apartment and whether they are even legally -allowed- to charge that much for it. clearly no renovation has been done in quite some time, and shoddy overpriced renovations are usually how they get the rent raised for regulated apartments. maybe it was never regulated, but that seems unlikely too.

ah, new york city real estate. how i loathe thee. i can't believe i live in a town where having A closet (and i mean literally just one closet) is luxurious.

more on that

folks, i said i wasn't going to look any further, and i didn't, but The Hater had a different version of the 'pieces left behind' (i want to make a spoof of the left behind series around that as the title/premise) on her page today and it is either far more, or just slightly less disturbing than the interrupted football game one. you decide.

weird tv of the week

there is so much that is awesomely disturbing about this commercial. from the anthropomorphizing of the young bear in a way that makes his nudity seem inappropriate* to the use of shame marketing** to the totally bizarre 'strength test' scene and the intense chasm between the tone and the narrative/subject matter***.

when i was looking for it on youtube, i noticed, a lot of people are uploading these commercials with the bears. i was going to investigate this bear commercial youtube uploader subculture and then i saw this video.

and i think delving any deeper might be too much for me.


*the flecks of tp on his butt emphasize his humanness, his nudity and his playing football simultaneously. but this commercial with humans instead of bears would be... oh my god totally amazing. but also really kind of icky and who would ever do that?

**the idea that "little white pieces" of toilet paper on my ass would be a source of embarrassment or disdain (his dad is so utterly and publicly disgusted) instead of discomfort or unhygiene.

***they go through all the trouble of saying 'bath tissue' and the commercial is absurdly vulgar in general message.

****i wish there was an easy way to format footnotes in a blog post where the reader could just click on the * and it would take them to the note and then you could just click back to where you were reading.

bee days

so i'm over at apartment therapy, trolling for work related ideas, and they've posted about bidets.

the pro- anti- bidet discussion gets rather heated, which is terribly amusing. seems people who don't use bidets really really don't want to, ever, and think it's indescribably gross.

somebody linked to this in-seat bidet, which i thought was the one with the super amusing how to animation, where they showed a button that is so the masturbation button and never talk about what it is, but i can't find the video. so maybe it's a different site? now that i think about it, it might have been a whole machine, and not in the seat.

Stewart's Foods and gas station, Oneonta, NY

bathroom type: single occupancy, co-ed
activities: pee, face wash, failed toothbrushing
amenities: none.
flush: regular
sink: regular, bars
dryer type: towel dispenser.

i forgot to take pics. oops! we slept in the car, so i used my bathroom opportunity to wash my face and brush my teeth. except i forgot toothpaste. so i just washed my face. i had to dry off with rough brown paper towels, but it worked out ok. i prefer the bar type of faucet handles, which they had here, because you can push them with the back of your hand. there wasn't anything terribly unique about this bathroom, but it was clean and got the job done. and again i didn't have to put paper down. if only it had had toothpaste!