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HISTORY AS IT
PASSES
I just spent half an hour looking through Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, and I still can’t find
anything relating to the colon. Nothing along the lines of “Truly
it must be said that the Pope’s gastrointestinal tract, like the very
man, is fallible” or “Those who do toil within the fields, and who eat
of the rough grains that do wear upon the colon are within God’s eyes
no less worthy of salvation than the bishops and men of the cloth who
claim for themselves a more elevated state of holiness and who consume
grains which are more favorable to the earthly body’s digestive
mechanisms.”
Not even a mention of a toilet, which is sort of odd when you realize
that he probably wrote a bunch of those theses while seated on his
humble throne. No kidding —
the leader of the Reformation was known to be constipated, and did some
of his writing while in the lavatory with his pants around the
ankles.
Ruminating on the can — bet you didn’t realize the role this act has
played in history.
Consider these little-known facts that I just made up:
2 gazillion years ago:
A fish near what is now Eritrea finally gets grossed out by having its
droppings float around after they’ve been, well, dropped, and decides
to evolve some legs so that it can go up on land and bury its excrement
in the sand, or just walk away from it.
3300 BC: Otzi
the Iceman crouches near a boulder in the Alps to relieve himself and
enjoy the view. As he relaxes and ruminates, his feet freeze to
the ground. Eventually, ice engulfs him. In 1991, some
hikers find this chilly mummy after one of them, spotting a figure in
the distance, partially concealed by rocks, treks over to ask, “Hey,
bro, can you spare some TP?”
30 BC: Cleopatra
sends servants across the known world to search for, as recorded in
recently translated hieroglyphics, “A spice or potion or some damn
thing to cure these *#$%!! hemorrhoids already, for Ra’s sake!!” They
fail. Many years later, Shakespeare is inspired by her story to
write Anthony and Cleopatra.
He also writes A Midsummer Night’s
Dream, a bawdy
tale about the odd quasi-dreams people have while sitting on the toilet
at 4 a.m., and As You Like It,
about the travails of a chef who cannot eat rare meat, sushi or other
food products that might disturb his gastrointestinal tract.
Shakespeare also wins several Academy Awards for his thrilling musical West Side Story.
1506 AD: Leonardo
da Vinci invents a flying machine with a small bathroom
compartment. It doesn’t actually fly, though, and even if it did,
a flight attendant would probably have told him he couldn’t use the
toilet because the captain had just turned on the “fasten seatbelt”
sign. The device and its lavatory grounded, Leonardo turns his
attention to other things, such as painting the Mona Lisa and inventing
an early version of the diaper, which he calls Nitor and fashions out of woven
palm fronds and goat hide. His buddy and fellow Ninja Turtle
Michelangelo will prove the effectiveness of this invention when he
paints the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and is stuck on scaffolding
all day.
1776 AD: Bored one
day while sitting in her colonial outhouse, Betsy Ross decides to take
up sewing, figuring it a useful hobby and a good way to pass the time
as she passes her patriotic, Revolutionary foodstuffs. Inspired
by the wood paneling of the outhouse and the twinkling stars she sees
through a hole in the ceiling, she creates the first American
flag. Realizing that she has no more toilet paper, she promptly
commits the first act of desecration of the stars-and-stripes.
1892 AD: A young
Albert Einstein, embarrassed by his gastrointestinal problems, concocts
an elaborate explanation for a teacher who scolds him for spending too
much time in the bathroom, telling her that understandings of space and
time are all relative. She sends him to the corner to sit on a
stool and “think about his lies,” which he does, and eventually comes
up with a General Theory of Relativity and many other advances in
quantum physics. His work eventually leads to the atomic bomb,
which in turn leads to the mushroom cloud, which in turn leads to a
sight gag involving flatulence, as seen in many really bad cartoons and
movies.
1953 AD: Beset by
diarrhea, a young musician named Elvis Presley runs into a seedy hotel
lobby in search of a bathroom. He makes it, just barely, and as
he sits on the toilet, he reads the graffiti that covers the
walls. One section is a scatological poem beginning “Here I sit
all broken-hearted . . .” Inspired, Presley pulls out a pen and
jots the first few lines of a song on a piece of the thick,
sandpaper-like toilet paper. The song is “Heartbreak Hotel,”
which later becomes his first hit single.
So much history has been written on the commode, or at least affected
by it, though this fact is often omitted from the textbooks.
Archaeologists have found strong evidence, however, that throughout
history and across all cultures, people — peasants and rulers alike —
have passed stool, crap, excrement and other digested food
products. And they have ruminated and invented and dreamed while
doing so.
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