Texas -- home to Houston Texans football, chainsaw massacres, and George W. Bush -- can now add pillaging plumbers to its list of blights upon the land. Yes, just when you thought it was safe to uncoil your bowels in a McDonald's restroom (you did think that, right?), along comes a pair of fast food restaurant bandits armed with backpacks, pipe wrenches, and a taste for chrome sweet chrome -- robbing the Lone Star State's less than-fine dining establishments of their toilet fixtures [1].

In one instance, surveillance cameras inside a Jack in the Box men's room caught the duo plying their nefarious trade. Within minutes, anything that wasn't cemented down by layers of archaeological piss, shit, and vomit was gone: flushing valves, the hand dryer, and -- just to ensure the thieves won't need a machete to clear their path to Hell -- even the toilet paper.

[2]

The removal of the toilet valves was an act of potty thievery that left the restroom with a severe flush wound -- no doubt a stark contrast to the pristine, lilac-field-in-Xanadu conditions normally housed therein. And while this crime spree may seem trivial to those of us who don't live in North Texas and /or would never avail ourselves of a Jack in the Box shitter under any circumstance, this article does raise a few questions.

First, why target fast food restaurant toilets? Whatever happened to the time-honored craft of pilfering copper wire and fixtures from construction sites? Why plumb the depths, so to speak, to steal Mickey D's diarrhea magnets when there's much greener (and cleaner) pastures to be had elsewhere?

Could it be that these men are not motivated by economic gain, but by vengeance? Could they in fact be plumbing vigilantes avenging a "beef" with fast food restaurants for perceived crimes perpetrated against their body's or their home's own plumbing? After all, few things wreak more havoc on our internal and domestic aqueducts than the fecal warheads produced by these establishments' greasy wafers of hair, bone, and gristle (as I think I recently adequately illustrated [3]).

Second, if and when these sticky-fingered kraptomaniacs are apprehended, what punishment do they merit? Do we show leniency and give them The Fast Food Hamburger Patty Treatment (which entails being placed in a pneumatic press and squeezed until they're flatter than Calista Flockhart after a double mastectomy, then tortured under a heat lamp while underpaid, life-weary teenagers hawk lung oysters on them)? Or do we take a show-no-mercy approach, and sentence the bastards to hand-wash the scenes of their crimes after the local high school football team runs a BK Broiler train on the shitter?

And finally -- and most importantly -- has anyone stopped to ask Heart Attack in a Box... er... Jack in the Box management just what in the hell surveillance cameras were doing INSIDE THE MEN'S RESTROOM?! I could understand if the cameras were trained solely on the sinks, monitoring employees' tendencies to wash their hands after dropping their payload. But the photos that accompany the article clearly show an open stall door and an exposed toilet. Is this legal? And just who or what is Jack in the Box trying to capture on tape? Scat burglars? Stool pigeons? You and me?

Sadly, this Poop Reporter is not "privy" to answers to these troublesome questions.