Being the water wise people we are, we have a bucket in our shower to collect water for the garden. I’m not sure how our plants feel about being hydrated with our icky bodily run-off, but they’re not really in a position to make demands. (After all, when a drought’s on, bougain­vil­laeas can’t be choosers.)

Ours isn’t a huge shower, but I’m fine with the bucket being there, as long as it’s in the corner to the front of me and to the right; that is; opposite the door, and at the furthest distance from the taps and showerhead.

It seems, however, that every time I step into the shower (usually daily, I’m quite the metro­sexual), the previous user of the shower (whom I shall here refer to as ‘the lady of the house’ or ‘m’lady’) has moved the bucket to a less favourable corner. That is to say, the corner opposite the door, but closest to the taps and showerhead.

This I find vexing, as it frequently results in brief but never­theless undesirable contact between the rim of the bucket and my right calf. And so I move the bucket to my preferred corner — and there it stays until the lady of the house comes to use the shower again.

On one such occasion I wondered if, despite my disquiet about m’lady’s preferred position for the bucket, I should return the receptacle there once my showering is complete. But then I reasoned that if we both moved the bucket to our preferred corner and left it there, we would be sharing the burden equally. If I alone moved the bucket back and forth each time, m’lady would never have to move it, and that’s clearly no way to achieve equality between the sexes.

This reminded me of a formu­lation I conceived many years ago concerning the most appro­priate default position (vertical or horizontal) for a toilet seat in a multisex share­house or office. (Just to clarify, I’m referring to a share­house or office in which there are members of both sexes, not one that plays host to a multitude of sex acts, necessarily.)

A frequent complaint about men is that they leave the toilet seat up. This is presented as no mere negli­gence on the man’s part, but as a delib­erate, calcu­lated act whose barbaric intent can be equated with that of clubbing a seal or harpooning a whale.

Let me suggest that if there are an equal number of men and women sharing a toilet (not simul­tan­eously, just to be clear), and each person places the toilet seat either up or down according to preference and need, then leaves the seat in that position upon the completion of their trans­action, the burden between the sexes is equally shared, as in the shower and bucket example above.

If anything, the males in this equation come out second best, since a proportion of their toilet usage will, one hopes, require the seat to be down. It would be unusual for such a visitor to lift the seat again once full satis­faction has been achieved; therefore, assuming the next visitor is female, they will find to their delight that the seat is in the optimal (ie. horizontal) position and not in the hysteria-inducing vertical position.

My point, elabor­ately made, is this. All other things (number of men using the toilet relative to number of women, regularity of bladder and bowel emptying, attent­iveness to the position of the toilet seat and appro­priate dealing therewith, etc) being equal, for every instance of a toilet seat having to be lowered following a previous visitor’s upright urination, there will be a slightly greater number of instances of a toilet seat having to be raised.

If anything, men should be complaining about the toilet seat being down all the time. After all, the consequences of accidentally sitting in a seatless toilet are mild embar­rassment and the possib­ility of acquiring a chill (and perhaps some bruising) around the rump; the consequences of accidentally making use of a toilet from the upright position while the seat is down include, but are not limited to, getting piss everywhere.

There’s an episode in the third series of Buffy: The Vampire Slayer in which Buffy becomes infected with demonic blood and gains the demon’s ability to hear people’s thoughts. At first she finds this new power amusing, enter­taining, even useful; but by the end of Act II, Buffy is overwhelmed by the cacophony of voices in her head and falls uncon­scious in the school cafeteria.

I was reminded of this when I happened upon Twittervision, which is a Google Maps/Twitter mashup tracking the latest tweets from around the world.

For those unfamiliar with Twitter, it’s a microb­logging format — a standalone version of the status updates (in this case, tweets) you might have encountered on Facebook, for example. (You might, but probably won’t, be inter­ested to know that my masthead is an RSS feed of my Twitter status.) It’s the very acme of Web 2.0 in that even if you could explain it to your parents, they would quite rightly perceive no useful purpose for it.

If everyone in the world had a Twitter account, Twittervision would be a veritable crystal ball for gazing into the zeitgeist; as it is, it’s a veritable monocle through which to scrutinise the thoughts and doings of about half a million computer nerds.

One day, of course, we will live in a world in which everyone’s thoughts — your thoughts, my thoughts, nerds’ thoughts — are broadcast to the internet before we’ve even had time to think them. And as we’ve seen with Facebook, today’s internet buffoonery is tomorrow’s answer to the prayers of advert­ising executives everywhere.

On the train the other night I noticed a lady reading a little Readers Digest–style self-help book. The jacket was printed in a reassuring, creamy white colour, offset with bold, empowering red type. And printed in this bold, empowering red type, set against the reasurring creamy white of the cover, was the title Joy in Suffering.

I’ll admit, there is something quite satis­fying, when you’re suffering a bout of melan­choly, to wrap yourself up in your misery and hurl yourself into the emotional gale, collar up, eyes downcast, teeth grit. And maybe there’s a place for a book that helps you do it. But I don’t think Joy in Suffering is it.

It certainly didn’t seem to do the trick for the women I saw; she eventually put the book back in her purse and started flicking through the MX, which is surely the ultimate in joy in suffering, minus the joy.

It wouldn’t be a stretch to describe me, in my weaker moments, as having a passive aggressive temperament. It’s a maligned trait; people would much rather you be aggressive aggressive. That way you get everything out in the open. People may get maimed or killed, but at least everyone knows where they stand. (Or not, if there’s been maiming and killing.)

Aggressive aggression led to two world wars during the twentieth century, and countless other territ­orial and religious conflicts throughout the ages. One wonders how the world might be different if Hitler had merely stood at the border of the Sudatenland, glowering across Western Europe and wearing a ‘Fine, keep your lebensraum’ T-shirt.

However, there are times when I can see the unhealthy and unattractive side of passive aggression. One manifest­ation of it in particular makes me pity and despise the passive aggressor. You may have encountered it yourself. It’s when someone in your workplace or share­house puts up one of those trite, sarcastic and judgmental notices concerning the kitchen fairy (more specifically, the non-employment thereof on the premises).

I’ve seen numerous examples of the kitchen fairy notice, most recently a version in the form of a job advert­isement. I can only presume that a simple ‘Please clean your dishes’ notice would fail to a) achieve the desired outcome, b) fill the author with the requisite degree of self-righteousness or c) deliver quite the same Martin-Luther-nailing-his-95-Theses-to-the-Wittenburg-church-door feeling.

When you work in publishing, you live in a state of constant anxiety that you might be responsible for letting a really nasty typo into the wild. I used to proofread telephone direct­ories (oh the glamour) and can still recall the cold, knifing fear that ran through me when it appeared that we’d included the wrong mobile phone number in a paid advert­isement for an erotic masseur. The masseur was OK about it, but the owner of the mobile phone, who was not an erotic masseur and had no interest in changing careers in that direction, threatened to sue.

Fortunately, the error was not mine, and I was able to obtain not only the correct phone number but also, subsequently and consequently, the pleasures of a highly relaxing massage.

I doubt the same soothing minis­tra­tions were available to English printer Robert Barker when he left out a fairly crucial appearance of the word ‘not’ in the 1631 edition of the King James Bible. Crucial because the ‘not’ was part of the Seventh Commandment in Exodus 20:14, which normally reads ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery’ — but in Barker’s edition became a commandment of a much more liber­ating nature.

Barker’s bible became known as the ‘Wicked Bible’. (Wicked as in devilish, not as in ‘Gnarly dude, thanks for the God-sanctioned sex-action’.) Barker wasn’t sued, but he was fined — something like £300, which pretty much destroyed him.

He did, however, manage to squeeze in several weeks of Bible-approved fornicatin’ before a replacement edition was printed.

I love the internet. Radiohead fans awaiting a special announcement at radioheadlp7.com during the week were foiled by an elaborate Rickroll.

A Rickroll occurs when you post a link that is so tantal­ising that over-eager Android’s Dungeon–types simply can’t resist clicking on it (“Footage of Carrie Fisher’s costume fitting for Return of a Jedi? Yes, I believe I would profit from seeing that”) but which actually sends the eager clicker in the pastel and flaming red coloured direction of a Rick Astley video on YouTube. Yes, that Rick Astley, emblem of the late 1980s and winner of the ‘popstar who most looks like David Caruso’ compet­ition hosted and judged by myself about six minutes ago.

A fuller and more amusing explan­ation of this internet phenomenon can be found at encyclopediadramatica.com.

And yes, I have been Rickrolled — because when it comes down to it, I’m really just an over-eager Android’s Dungeon type.

No, I won’t tell you what I clicked on.

Seriously Dude, Where’s My Car?

Seriously.