I have sleep apnea, a condition that forces me to sleep with a CPAP machine. For the benefit of you uninitiated in medical argot, CPAP stands for "Constant Positive Air Pressure." The machine, through a snug-fitting mask, keeps positive pressure on the soft tissues of my breathing passages and prevents them from closing while I'm asleep. Apnea can be deadly; if you're very tired when your breathing stops you might just expire in your sleep.
Author's Note: This is my first submission to Poop Report, even though I've been browsing for over five years and anonymously browsing for longer. We all know how the story ends: not with redemption, but with "I couldn't believe it. I thought these stories were apocryphal. I shat my pants." If you're expecting something different, you won't get it. I over-ate, drove home, didn't quite make it, and shat my pants.
The other day I was in Wally World picking up a few odds and ends when the need to rid myself of some coffee arose. I ambled to the back of the store and entered the Men's room. It looked pretty much like any Walmart crapper; wet paper towels on the floor, both urinals covered with plastic bags taped to the wall, and the trash receptacle in the wall overflowing to the floor. The smell was, however, unlike any toilet I've ever encountered anywhere: it was a sickly sweet odor commingled with the usual fecal scent, and the distinctive and horrendous stench of rotting carrion.
In case you did not know, iGoogle is shutting down in a few days. As a loyal fan to the little fox in the Teahouse theme, I was very sad to hear the news. Yes, I can keep my Gmail account open to see the theme, but it would be nice to find a new browser home page that hosted the theme. It was during a search for a new homepage and organizer that I stumbled across Netvibes. This device application allows the user to collect information on different topics or interests by simply typing those interests into a search bar.
My brother clued me in to a gem of a blog to me last week. The blog, terriblerealestateagentphotos.com, is as it sounds; it is a blog to which some genius British individual with a wonderfully dry British sense of humor posts terrible real estate photos that are sent in by the adoring internet public. To our delight, many of the photos include Holy Porcelain. Here are a few of my favorites:
In what I hope is the final installation of daphne's Septic Tank Poopgate 2013, I wanted to share with you a piece of information that a technician from our septic company told me today while he was installing a floater tree in our septic pump.
We have been having trouble with a sewer/stinky home perm smell in the bathroom closest to our drain line, as you may have read here. It took me a few days to determine that the bathtub in the kids’ bathroom was draining slowly because some dunderhead was not using the plastic hair trap I bought at Wal-Mart. This pissed me off to no end; a plastic hair trap/drain cover is a two-dollar and fifty-cent answer to a two-thousand dollar problem.
I was in a somewhat grumpy mood as I walked groggily into the living room on Thursday morning. I hadn't eaten for a few days, sheer torture for a fat man who is something of a gourmand. My wife had fed the cats. They all had their fuzzy little heads thrust into bowls of some kind of kitty kibbles and were making satisfied crunching sounds.
This week the wild animals of Hardin County, Kentucky lost their biggest supporter, and the world lost a wonderful person. My former boss, Monika Wilcox, died from injuries sustained from a fall in her home. I worked at her wildlife rehab from 2000 to 2002, and during that time, I learned more about animal poop than I could have ever imagined: raccoon, goose, deer, hawk, owl, possum, goat, kestrel, songbird, cat, dog, bear, cougar, woodchuck, and even bat poop.
I was hungover. I had tried to sleep for a couple hours but sleep wouldn't come. I was in that wretched, maudlin phase of a hangover -- feeling too lousy and beat to hell to do anything worthwhile, but not able to just sleep it off.
There was a bloodcurdling scream from the vicinity of the produce aisle. The employees grabbed their weapons and responded as fast as possible but alas, it was too late. The prone corpse of a diminutive old lady was on the floor, being stripped of the last morsel of its flesh by hundreds of carrion crows and vultures. Our response, rapid as it was, had come too late. Our meat cleavers, air rifles, and baseball bats would help this victim not one iota. Rest in peace--or should that be pieces--Miss Daisy.
Editor's Note: Sometimes we are so afraid that we almost shit ourselves. Almost. Here is one of those times in the life of our beloved and venerable Chief Thunderbutt.
Ever wonder what it would be like to cross the vast Pacific in a giant chamber pot or bedpan rather than a plane? Wonder no more because it's now been done!
The 25h (Twenty Five Hours) Hotel Bikini recently opened in Berlin. The ten-story building is one of many from the 25Hours group that designer Werner Aisslinger describes as "designed-oriented boutique hotels." At the top floor, one can dine in a 360-degree, panoramic-view restaurant appropriately named The Monkey Bar, and take in the scenery of the Berlin Zoo and surrounding property. Like all sit-down restaurants, this one provides restroom facilities for its patrons.
When I was a kid, I remember Pittsburgh Pirate Dave Parker went through a slump. This bothered me, as my new, woven-web ball glove came with his autograph; therefore I took notice when his stinky batting caused him to be showered later in right field with items tossed from the upper decks in Cincinnati. Apple cores, cups of beer, and even a transistor battery came close to hitting him, but never a toilet seat, let alone an entire bowl. No, I never heard of someone hitting someone with a toilet bowl at a sporting event until today.
The universe has delivered upon us the brown version of homeostasis this past week. Detroit, Michigan receives a brown thumbs up, and Miami/Dade County, Florida receives a big old thumbs down. In the balance? Our nation's disabled and their companion service dogs.
In case you have been hiding under a rock for the past two years, Macklemore is a Seattle-based musician who loves thrift shops and was rewarded by the music community for it with Grammy awards two years in a row, American Music awards, BET awards, and Billboard awards to name a few.
Petey is not your average five month-old pitbull puppy. While most of these little darlings enjoy nibbling their owners' fingers and chewing on pig ears, Petey seemed to have developed a different taste for toys. Rawhide? No. That aforementioned pig ear? No. Sorry. A two-foot section of soft rope with big-assed knots at both ends? Not even close.
Porcelain has been handling the storing and serving needs of humanity for almost 2,000 years. We eat off of it. We store food in it. We cook in it. We drink out of it. We poop and pee in it. In order for porcelain to be so darned snappy at keeping some stuff in and other stuff out, it has to be practically nonporous. And when something is nonporous, it is usually also dangerously sharp and brittle when pushed to the breaking point.
We've all been there, driving on Route Whatever, when the need to go outweighs our fear of the horrors of the roadside restroom. It matters not, the reason we find ourselves scooting toward the pimply-faced teenager at the register and begging for a restroom key, one that is almost always attached to something ridiculous ... a two-by-four previously wielded by Hacksaw Jim Duggan ... a naked Barbie doll with singed hair ... a prosthetic limb; nor does it matter that we often feel as if we are taking a Walk of Shame, carrying that obnoxiously decorated key.
If Yakov Smirnoff had to sum up today's newswire, he might say, "In the United States, your stink offends the toilet freshener; in Ukraine, toilet freshener offends you." That's because the German manufacturer Henkel distributed a toilet freshener branded with the Ukraine flag's colors of blue and yellow.
Toilet paper. When I think of it, images of bathrooms, flushing, those stupid Charmin Bears (how I hate the Charmin Bears), and of course pee and poop come to my mind. But murder? No … not until now. This week, an inmate at Florida’s Pinellas County Jail confessed to murdering his cell mate by stuffing wet toilet paper down the cell mate’s throat and then strangling him.
We’ve followed sanitation issues in India ever since our brave and fearless founder Dave took a year-long working assignment in New Dehli back in 2007. Six-hundred and twenty-six million men, women, and children in India are used to pooping in an open field or in an open sewer grate, because most of the country’s rural and underprivileged citizens still do not have flush or composting toilets.
A Starbucks in Hong Kong has come under scrutiny from some angry customers when they discovered employers have been forced to use a water source located an arm's length from a urinal to make coffee. Ew!
Poor A. J. Clemente: he may have established a new world's record for losing a job. Seconds into his first broadcast, he committed the unpardonable sin of mouthing not one but two taboo words into his microphone. He said he thought the mike was off and he was practicing his teasers (whatever teasers may be), when he sent the words "fucking shit" through the ether and into the ears of countless listeners in the Bismark, North Dakota area . . .
Well, here's a first. Designer Jan Ctvrtnik may have shared a bathroom with a few sloppy siblings. I imagine the present-day senior industrial designer for Electrolux Home Products as a child, performing The Move after waiting way too long for a turn at the bathroom, only to find the seat is covered in pee a tad too late.
As an answer to this scenario we have the Toilet Pages:
It’s that time of year again. The sun is shining, the bees are buzzing, the evening breezes are warm, and the call of the local fair brings thousands of families together to celebrate. Eat cotton candy. Ride the rides. Stroll the boardwalk.
And try to make your kid use the disgusting, smelly, dank-and-poopy, adult-sized porta-potties provided by the county.
Quite often we are contacted by bathroom-based product entrepreneurs who want us to review their products. In case you haven’t been able to tell, I love to review stuff. This is because I love getting things for free. Love it. Scented butt wipes? Sure! Stuff to spray on my toilet paper? Why not? Lemony goodness to spritz into the toilet bowl before I poop so the bathroom will not smell? That sounds awesome. (As you may suspect, I don’t get out much.)
We like buying things at bargain prices, so we get toilet paper in packages of 12 to 36 rolls at a time, both to get it cheaper by the unit and to lay up a supply that lasts a few months, at least. Last time we got a big package; it was 24 rolls of Charmin or the like, nice, thick-textured, two-ply paper. We hadn't meant to get that type, as we usually get Scott or something similar. The soft sweet paper is pleasant to use, though it can come apart when wiping after a sticky bowel movement. While the single ply doesn't break as easily as the double, it requires more sheets.
We’ve all been there before. The bathroom may be the one in your work office, or it may be one in the apartment of a prospective paramour. It matters not. What matters is that you realize too late that there is no air freshener to be found.
You have just taken a horrendously nasty crap and the bathroom now stinks, eye-wateringly bad. There is no fan, no window, and the courtesy flush was ineffective. No perfume is in the medicine cabinet. No cleaning product is under the sink. Worse, someone knocks on the door, and starts to talk:
Last week I received an "anonymous" front page submission about another website that mails poop to the unsuspecting victim of one's choice. Read on; I only cleaned up the punctuation and spelling:
No words. Check this website out. It's not a joke. People can now mail actual animal shit to whomever they want (only in the US)!
I recently was able to review a new personal hygiene product that is not only available on the web, but is now entered on the website Get On The Shelf in the hopes that it will be made available at Wal-Mart. The product, Puro Lotion, was sent to me by Puro’s Director of Business Development, Brent Douglas.
After a four-year hiatus, AssinTheBox.com is back online, and according to site owner Kevin Brown is serving up sweet spring-loaded 'remote mooning systems' delivered anonymously via FedEx.
For the Ass newbie, Kevin's website allows for a visitor to order a spring-loaded butt that pops up when the recipient opens the box, as you see here:
Several weeks ago I was contacted by Robert Edwards from the Squatty Potty website about reviewing his product, the Squatty Potty toilet stool. Free stuff, I thought? You betcha’! “Send one right over!” I immediately replied. I am so glad that I said that.
New hope for stinky and dirty butts is on the horizon.Since I joined Poop Report seven years ago, I have been fortunate enough to review many toilet-related products for the site. Some of the products were great, and I enjoyed writing reviews for them. Many of the products, however, were so poorly designed that I wasn’t able to publish their reviews with a clear conscience because my review on some of these products would have been the equivalent of a product snuff job. This was not the case when I reviewed the product at hand, though.
It was a bright, sunny autumn day. My dad was driving his "new to us" 1977 Pontiac Sunbird along the country road leading to our cottage, accompanied by my older brother in the front seat and me in the back seat. The Sunbird, with its compact size and V6 motor, was considered a "peppy" car and we were "pepping" along at a clip of 65 miles per hour.
In terms of poo-related catastrophes, camping and alcohol together are akin to a jackhammer in a nitroglycerine warehouse. I have never been on a camping/drinking trip where something nightmarish didn't happen involving poop. In fact, one of our favorite camping buddies is nicknamed Pancake because he left a pile of poo that looked interestingly like a stack of pancakes. But this isn't about dear Pancake and his complicated creation you would hope not to find on an IHOP menu. This story is about my sister--and The Hole.
I decided to take my boyfriend on an adventure to another part of our state, where he had never been before, and spend a glorious day together. Everything went decidedly well until after hours of driving home, when I decided to let a fart escape. The moment I let out what I thought was air my bowels evacuated, and I shit myself in my car, literally feet from his apartment. I dropped him at his car and he followed me home. I blamed the smell on a fart, until I had to get out of the car...
My friend and I recently visited Spain. On our first night there we got very drunk. I woke up the next morning absolutely hanging. I stumbled over and knocked on my friend's room's door, and when he opened the door it really stank. I couldn't breathe properly. I thought he must have taken a big poo just before I entered.
My friends and I took a trip from New Jersey to North Carolina to help a friend of ours move. We spent the previous night drinking Guinness and Bacardi 151. Bad idea.
We woke up early that morning to a cold winter day and started slamming Wawa coffees along with some breakfast sandwiches. Another bad idea.
It was a work trip in India that brought me to this god-forsaken experience. First time in the subcontinent, and I had been practicing since a young age (only engaging the finest purveyors of hot curries). Nothing was to prepare me for the onslaught my squid's eye was to endure.
I was taken out the first night by a couple of colleagues to a great restaurant when we were in Bangalore. Being the tough, curry-eating strongman I was, I decided to really show off, ordering the hottest dish, and sending it back twice for more heat. Error Number One.
When I was 12 years old I went on a little vacation with a friend of mine and his parents. We were going to Virginia Beach for a few days, to enjoy the beach and all the fun that came with it. Since we drove from Pennsylvania, we stopped along the way to get some lunch. I'm not going to mention what fast food joint we ate at, but I'll say this the food at this particular restaurant tastes really good going in, but it does a number on you on the way out.
After we ate our meal, back on the road we went. Maybe half and hour or more passed when I felt it...
As a someone who spends a decent amount of time using a toilet because, well, everyone does, and also because I suffer from IBS, I was a little concerned about traveling abroad. I know that different kinds of foods can upset my stomach; also I had heard stories about communal bathrooms for both men and women. Now imagine my shock when I did arrive in Germany and the worse thing is the toilet.
A couple of weeks ago we took a weekend trip to Nashville, and after a day of carousing the Tennessee countryside we finally checked into our hotel. The wife was tired and wanted to nap for a bit before we went downtown to explore the honky tonks, and I wanted to unload a turd that had been squirming to get out for the past few hours.
On the last day that my friends and I would be together before we split for winter break, we went to a sushi buffet restaurant called Yamato. This restaurant had decent sushi and its prices were affordable, and boy can you become full after an hour or two there!
When I was seventeen I went to Germany on a school exchange with a bunch of other kids. We all ended up in different cities but got back together again to visit Berlin. We stayed in a youth hostel that had what we'd consider average public toilets. I don't know why, but I've never had the nerve to go Number Two with someone else in the vicinity! I have to have complete privacy. Because I couldn't get that privacy, I held on for five whole days.
Everyone remembers the blizzard that ripped through the Midwest, right? Well, it just so happens that my wife and I were heading home from the Kansas City airport with one of our friends, "T", who was flying back from visiting family, when it was in full swing. Granted, we live outside of St. Louis, where there is another airport, but it had closed down way before the storm. My wife and I volunteered to get T so she and her hubby, "S", could watch their son play in district championship basketball.