Slimejam

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.

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 liebensraum’ 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 relaxing (and erotic) 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.

NB: Elements of this post (the bit about the erotic massage and the fornicatin’, for example) are not entirely aligned with the truth

First there’s all the fun of adding wacky information about yourself to your Facebook profile.

Then comes the slow realisation that anyone — current or prospective employers, the police, animal rights activists — can now discover that you’re interested in ‘nude performance art’, ‘cockfighting’ and ‘nude cockfighting as performance art’.

Then begins the guilty, remorseful process of deleting the offending material before it gets noticed by anyone in a position to strip you of your job, your liberty or your afterlife.

I was walking down my street this morning when I heard a tune both mournful and carnivalesque.

Around the corner walked a crusty, withered old rake playing some sort of sea shanty on a mouth organ. He wore a dark navy overcoat and tugged upon his grubby sailor’s cap as we bade each other good morning.

I thought how splendid it was that he was providing his own entertainment. I thought, “Wow, that’s so much better than carrying an iPod around”.

Then I thought, “Wait a minute, you can’t listen to a podcast commentary of last night’s episode of Doctor Who on a mouth organ.”

A little while ago I wrote about Conservapedia, the pro-Christian, pro-American alternative to Wikipedia (which is apparently anti- both). One of the differences between Wikipedia and Conservapedia is that Wikipedia provides ample information about who is behind the site. Another is that if Conservapedia had an entry for tomato sauce, you wouldn’t find the following disclaimer at the top of the article:
UPDATE: Some kiljoy has modified the Wikipedia entry for Tomato sauce and applied the standard disclaimer — boo! I bet it was an anti-fun Conservapedian!

No. Conservapedia is in fact a conservative alternative to Wikipedia. Conservapedia’s stated purpose is to counteract Wikipedia’s anti-American, anti-Christian liberal bias. Conservapedia is concerned that “Wikipedia is six times more liberal than the American public”, based on a comparison of polling information about liberal/conservative identification among the American public and the political persuasions of Wikipedia’s individual editors. Whether Wikipedia’s supposed political leanings might reflect a more global political viewpoint is given no consideration: Wikipedia should only reflect American values, according to Conservapedia’s editors — whoever they might be. The website offers virtually no information about who’s actually behind Conservapedia: where Wikipedia has a detailed ‘about’ section and provides information about the Wikipedia Foundation, Conservapedia’s about page is fairly anemic. Which is more than can be said for their general disclaimer page, which at the time of writing was a wasteland of white space. In fact, I had to look Conservapedia up on Wikipedia to find out more. Is it a joke? I don’t know. It’s certainly amusing. A comment on the blog that originally alerted me to Conservapedia suggested taking a look at the entry on Santa Claus. Apparently Nicholas was born somewhere between 280-343 AD and to a couple in present day Turkey. Presumably they mean he was born in an area corresponding to present-day Turkey, but I kind of like the idea of Nick being able to time travel in utero. It might explain how as an adult he is able to visit so many chimneys on Christmas Eve. So thanks Conservapedia — I can believe in Santa Claus again!