Mr Buckshot
February 2nd, 2009, 02:29 AM
www.poopreport.com (http://www.poopreport.com) - the "stories about poop" and "intellectual crap" sections are the must-reads.
Warning: Barf bags not included. But I assure you, there are no disgusting photos, just disgusting text. I'm quite serious.
One of the stories I'll always remember:
The Turd Terrorists Of Almaty, Kazakhstan
Posted 02.22.2005 by Vertical Grimace (http://www.poopreport.com/user/vertical_grimace) (33)
I've lived in Almaty, Kazakhstan for the past three years, and during that time I've seen more human shit in places that it didn't belong than I care to mention. Most of the time it's placed in these locations by folks who just can't be bothered to go through all the hassle of finding an appropriate place to drop off the kids. But sometimes these noxious land mines are the result of deliberate, pre-meditated turd terrorism. So you might want to print this out, kick back, grab a roll of your favorite wiping medium, and let me tell you a little story about life in the former Soviet Union stinkpot I like to call Kaka-stain. I live in one of the many grey, moribund apartment buildings that make up most of the housing units in the city. It's not even that old -- it was built in the late 80's, and at the time the people who were lucky enough to get an apartment in this building were probably saying "Nah nah nah, I got a dope crib, yo," and thumbing their noses at those suckers living in the Stalin-era communals and the other dumps that are still around to this day. But the building is pretty dilapidated now. The elevators are always breaking down and I guess the person responsible for cleaning the common areas like the staircase, the entrance, and the area where the elevators are located fucked off out of here long before I moved in last year. So trash piles up and just kind of hangs around until some old pensioner gets sick enough of seeing it and picks it up. All in all, it's a nasty-assed building, but the apartment I live in is dope and you can't beat the location. So I've lived here for almost fourteen months and just put up with the general lack of sanitation.
For a city its size, Almaty has more than its fair share of bums. I noticed in the summer that a group of them lives in the yard behind the building, but I didn't pay much attention to them since they never bothered or confronted me. Mostly I would see them digging through the trash or picking up bottles to cash in for cheap vodka or a hit of heroin or whatever. I even saw bums fucking a few times out there; they didn't care at all if anyone was watching them.
It wasn't until this winter, which has been unusually cold, that the bums became a visible -- and eventually huge -- problem. It all began one morning when I came out of my apartment to go to work. There are four units on each floor and a common area in the center where the elevators are. I had begun noticing trash, empty vodka bottles (of the cheapest sort available, around twenty cents for a pint) and discarded syringes scattered about in this area outside my door, so I was on the lookout. I don't like drug addicts and freaks hanging around where I live -- they should be living under a bridge or in a cardboard box somewhere far away from me. So that morning, when I came out and saw some feet poking out from around the corner inside the stairwell located right next to my door, I decided to check it out, since no one usually hangs out in the stairwell.
It turned out to be a quartet of the stinkiest, filthiest, and most inebriated homeless folks I'd ever laid eyes on. Three guys and a woman, all in their 30's and 40's. One guy was passed out with a needle dangling from his arm. The woman was cooking up a dandy little jolt of horse in what appeared to be a very well used and lovingly blackened spoon, oblivious to my presence for a good thirty seconds as I took in the view before me. I spoke up loudly and suddenly, startling her and almost making her drop her spoon. I told her basically to wake her friends and get the fuck out of my building or I would be coming back with the cops. They had really made themselves at home, with blankets and sacks filled with sand or something that they were using as pillows.
She said OK, no problem, she would need some time to revive her fallen comrade and gather things up, and they would be out of there in ten minutes. Figuring I had put a little scare into them, I went off to work and forgot all about it. But when I returned home hours later, I came upon the same motley group of dirtballs. They hadn't moved an inch. The guys were out cold, and the lovely young lady was swigging vodka from a bottle and scratching her crotch enthusiastically with her free hand when I burst into the stairwell. I told her in no uncertain terms that if she didn't pack up her junkie friends and get the hell out straight away, I was calling the police. She just ignored me.
Now, dealing with the local police isn't fun for anyone, including the person who called them to report something. I won't go into great detail; suffice it to say, it wasn't really an option. Likely they wouldn't have showed up for a long time anyway, if at all. By the time they would have gotten here I figured these a-holes would have moved on and all that would happen is I would get grilled and hassled by the dickhead cops because I'm a foreigner. So I bluffed them and took my cordless phone out into the stairwell, where I pretended like I was talking to the cops on the other end. In reality, I was talking into a phone that was turned off. I described the situation, said I was an executive in a big foreign company with lots of powerful friends, and told them I wanted these bastards out of my place. I thanked the imaginary dispatcher, pretended to hang up the phone, and informed the bums that the police would arrive in twenty minutes, so they better pack it up and get the hell out.
The response was a little unexpected: the 'woman,' who had pissed herself sometime while I was pretending to be on the phone, spat at me (luckily missing, though narrowly) and shouted something to the effect of, "Fuck you and your police, we're not afraid of you and we're not moving."
One of the guys had been eyeing me and stealthily edging his way toward the corner. He must have sobered up pretty good, because he produced a large hatchet which had been stashed out of sight, leapt up and lunged at me with it held high over his head, aiming to split my skull right down the middle. This all occurred in a fraction of a second. I did the only thing a sensible, athletic man of thirty-two would do in such a situation: I ran my ass off to my luckily still-open door and locked myself inside. The guy struck my metal door with his hatchet a couple times, and then silence.
I never wished to have a gun more in my life than at that moment, and I wouldn't have hesitated to use it. I still didn't want to call the cops, but my girl was on her way over and I was worried the junkies would still be in the stairwell when she arrived. In fact, they left quickly, since they quite rightly realized I wasn't going to stand for being assaulted with a fucking axe in my own home. I was really bristling with anger and felt like my personal security and that of the woman I love had been utterly compromised.
She soothed me like only she knows how to do, and my anger began to recede. The rest of the evening passed without incident, and by morning it seemed like just another tale for my scrapbook of memories from Kaka-stain. But when I opened the front door the next morning, I felt a bit of uncharacteristic resistance hindering the swing of it. I listened for the clink of bottles, which I've heard before when opening my door in the morning; that's how the bums got me pissed off in the first place, by leaving their bottles and trash right outside my door so that I knocked them over when I opened it. But this was no bottle or wad of newspaper, nor even a used syringe or goo-filled condom -- it was an enormous log of human shit, laid directly in front of my door. Swinging open the door had hopelessly smeared it across the floor; and to make matters worse, I didn't see or smell it until I had already taken a step directly into it.
To be more accurate: I saw and smelled it precisely one nanosecond before the sole of my boot made contact with the pungent muck -- hardly enough time for my brain to freak out and send a signal to my left leg saying, "Stop, fool, stop!"
Realizing what had just occur red, I froze in place, attempting to minimize the damage. My lovely girlfriend, who feigns pushiness at times in a misguided attempt to inject a little extra humor into my life, had no idea what had just happened, and gave me a jovial yet boisterous shove out the door... bad, bad idea. All my weight was balanced on the left foot, which was planted in a massive pile of shit.
If you've never stepped in shit before -- and who the fuck hasn't stepped in dog shit? But I mean a big pile of human butt butter -- you know that cartoonists should have been using dung logs instead of banana peels to represent that slippery medium that sends people, animals, and even cars flying head over heels. I don't recall having stepped in anything so slippery in my life. So due to my position in the doorway, with my weight on the foot in the shit and my girlfriend shoving me from behind, said foot came abruptly out from under me. Now I was sitting on my duff, in a brand-new knee-length cashmere overcoat, in a pile of bum turd.
My girlfriend got a whiff of the fecal aroma and shrieked. She then accused me of shitting my pants, which I vigorously and passionately denied, all the while sitting in the shit because I was so mortified I had no desire to stand and see the damage. I finally came to my senses and stood up. I fought off my desire to burst into tears (I figured even slipping in shit and getting it all over my coveted cashmere coat wasn't enough justification to bawl in front of a girl), kicked off my shoe outside the door, and hauled ass to the bathroom, where I pulled off the coat and deposited it in the tub. I wasn't ready to throw it in the trash, since I had paid over $1200 for it just a week before. I never buy things like that for myself, and I wasn't going to let those bums get to me so easily. I grabbed a trash bag from the kitchen, carefully placed the coat inside and deposited it on the balcony, where the smell wouldn't annoy me in the house.
I changed my clothes for good measure, but I still felt dirty, so I took a quick shower and put on fresh clothes. I came out of the bedroom to find my girl sitting on the couch in the entrance, still under the impression that I had shit myself. Since I like to booze it up once in a while, she had it in her head that I had gotten up in the night, not been able to find the can, and stepped out the front door to pinch a loaf. Through careful explanation and rationalization, I was finally able to convince her of the truth and nip in the bud the possibility of her leaving me for being an incontinent slob. (She's not at all shallow, but who wants to leave such things to chance?)
I cautiously opened the door and stepped over the mess to get a better look at how this act of turd terrorism had taken place. Upon inspection, it became immediately obvious that the terrorist had simply dropped trou, leaned up against my door, and let the fudge bomb slide out his or her ass, leaving a tell-tale brown stripe down the front of the door. It had spent the night like that, leaning forlornly against the door, probably lonely and cold outside the shelter of its former host's colon. To make things even worse for Mr. Chunky, he had been smeared by the door, stepped in, and fallen upon. I felt sorry for him; but he couldn't stay where he was.
For once the trash in the entryway became useful. I formed a makeshift pooper-scooper from some discarded cardboard and made quick work of the sickening mess, and then followed that up with a good washing and disinfection. Already more than an hour late for work, I fetched my shit-covered overcoat from the balcony, donned a clean coat and shoes, and ushered my girl downstairs. I retrieved my car from the garage and placed the coat, now wrapped and sealed in several bags, in the trunk. I dropped it off at the dry cleaner, warned them about the contents, and paid the girl at the counter substantially for her trouble. Then I dropped my lady off at work and drove to my office.
I was on edge all day, thrown completely off-kilter by the act o f terror. I decided not to tell anyone in my office about it, choosing instead to sit quietly in my room and avoid all contact with my colleagues.
That evening I went home as usual. Lo and behold, there were EIGHT bums in my stairwell -- all four from the previous night, plus four new ones. They were having a little party, complete with a toasty bonfire right there in the stairwell. Apparently they had been at it most of the day, since there was a substantial amount of empty bottles, syringes, and cigarette butts on the floor around them. I pretended like I didn't see them, went inside my apartment, called two of my friends, and waited. My friends arrived about fifteen minutes later. We each selected a golf club from my bag in the closet. I chose a sand wedge, Yuri a six iron, and Rudolf opted for my Ping putter. Unfortunately, all of those clubs ended up getting broken, but I saved the heads and had new shafts sent over from the States before spring.
We didn't kill anyone, but eight homeless junkies got quite a hiding that night. We threw them out in the snow one by one like cordwood when we were finished with them. I felt a great weight lifted from my shoulders, and that night I slept like a baby.
Weeks went by, and I figured we had really taught those douchebags a lesson. I cautiously opened my door every morning, just in case. I eyeballed anyone suspicious looking who even came near the entrance of the building, but saw hide nor hair of my adversaries. I woke up late at night and peered into the stairwell to try and catch anyone who may have been lurking there. Nothing. I finally relaxed, and went about life as usual.
Then, unbelievably, it happened again. It seems like you just can't break some people, even if you and a couple of your buddies try to do it with the help of a few Tommy Armour cavity-back irons. This time it was a duet: one solid log, and one runny pool of bowel sauce, smack in front of my door.
Since the last occurrence, the heating system had shut down in the entryway, and bitter cold had utterly penetrated the building. That's probably why I hadn't seen the bums -- they had moved on to better, warmer digs. But that didn't stop them from coming back and leaving me a little present. Since the temperature was about twenty below zero in there, the shit had frozen solid. I couldn't open my door far enough to see what was there and had to strike it a few times until the shit was partially shattered by the weight of the door. Most of it, however, remained firmly cemented to the floor.
I elected to call in the professionals to handle this one: two old Soviet babushkas from the building who were in charge of keeping the yard outside picked up. They didn't do much of a job of it, since they were shit-faced drunk most of the time, but I didn't really have an option at that point. I paid each of them about $5, which was more than enough to make them both happy, and when I came home I found they had somehow managed to dislodge the frozen fudge. In fact, they cleaned the entire area very well, which had me in shock.
I was thinking all day about how I could defend myself against future acts of turd terrorism, and had settled on what I thought was a pretty good solution; a wireless surveillance camera, set to record any activity outside my door. I configured it to relay the signal to my home computer, hoping to catch someone in the act.
Another few weeks went by without incident. I would wake in the night to check and see if anything had been recorded (the camera would only record if triggered by a motion sensor), but got nothing except my elderly neighbors occasionally coming out of their apartments in the ungodly early morning hours. Any hope of catching the perpetrators of these heinous-anus crimes was fading fast as spring approached -- the bands of druggie bums tend to migrate according to the seasons, and I was afraid I'd never get the fuckers. By that point I had grown a little bored of the whole thing, but revenge still smoldered somewhere deep inside me. I s topped staying home and staring at my computer screen, and started hanging out with my friends in the nightclubs more often.
One warm, rainy April night, I stumbled into my building around five AM after a night of merrymaking with the rowdies. The elevators were on the fritz again, so I had to hump it up the stairs. I rounded the last corner before my landing and nearly stepped on him in the darkness. I squinted in the dimness of the stairwell, and as my eyes adjusted to the light I realized I was staring at the motherfucker who had attacked me with a hatchet. He looked like the kind of guy who fit the profile of a turd terrorist -- at least in my mind. Anyway, it didn't matter at that point, since I had about a liter of booze in me and a mean streak that rivaled the brown streak which had been left on my door the first time around.
I clearly recall stepping over the guy fast asleep on the landing, unlocking my door, and fetching a roll of paper towels from the kitchen table. I changed into a pair of shorts and a t-shirt and grabbed a knife from the kitchen, just in case. I then stepped back out into the stairwell, dropped my shorts and boxers, hovered over the junkie, and calmly deposited the contents of my colon on his midsection.
He never moved or made a sound as I floated above him for more than a minute, firing chunks of shit and watery feces all over him. I wiped my ass with the paper towel, laid it on his stomach, and went back inside my apartment. Exhausted from a lot of liquor and the ecstasy of righteous revenge, I fell fast asleep.
I slept through my alarm the next morning and finally dragged my hung-over ass out of bed around two PM. It took about ten minutes for me to sort out whether my recollection of the night before had been a dream or reality. I battled with my brain for what seemed like an eternity, and finally decided I had to see for myself. I stealthily unlocked the door and peered into the stairwell... no one there. I noiselessly tiptoed to the threshold and peered down at the landing... nothing there.
Nothing, that is, except for some splatters of shit and a wad of very used paper towel. I smiled to myself, went back inside, and called the babushkas who had cleaned up the shitsicles several weeks before. I had a job for them, and I hoped it would be their last.
As it turned out, it was. I haven't seen any junkies around here for almost a year. The moral I learned from this was: shit must be fought with shit. No choice. An eye for an eye, a turd for a turd. And if you are mad enough to shit on someone, you are a force to be reckoned with. Forget the Hot Carl; it'll always be the Hot Ivan to me, for as long as I live.
One of the intellectual craps:
The Great Stink: When England Was Disgusting (And Why America's Rivers Still Are)
Posted 10.15.2007 by Dave (http://www.poopreport.com/user/dave) (11808)
On the morning of August 8, three inches of rain fell on Brooklyn. On the 3,200 Brooklyn acres that drain into the Red Hook Water Pollution Control Plant, 260 million gallons of runoff coursed into the sewers, mixing with millions of gallons of human waste already headed towards a treatment plant capable of processing only 60 million gallons per day. When flow exceeds capacity by that much, the only choice is to channel it all, untreated, into the waterways. And so emergency outflow points in Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal and across Upper New York Bay began to ejaculate diluted sewage.
But aside from homeowners whose basements were flooded by Gowanus sewage and beachgoers who swam in feces the next day, few people paid attention to the sewer overflows. After all, New York City averages 53 combined sewer overflows (CSOs) a year, and 772 American communities have combined wastewater and rainwater sewers that overflow during heavy rains. But since CSOs rarely make the news and few politicians want to stake political capital on sewers, the political will to fix them probably won't appear until the problem becomes a catastrophe.
This is the story of one such catastrophe: a stench so vile that it changed the course of human sanitation.
London in 1858 was not a pleasant place for people who enjoyed breathing through their nose. The Industrial Revolution had attracted three million fortune-seekers to the big city, turning housing into a two-pronged competition: landlords tried to see how many times they could subdivide a flat and tenants tried to see how many people they could pack into each one. Every inch of real estate not reserved for someone sleeping was appropriated by the machinery of capitalism -- neighborhoods teemed with tanneries, breweries, soap factories, glue works, slaughterhouses, laundries, and bone boilers, and pollution spewed into the skies and streets and sewers from each one.
Spewing waste: that's an excellent metaphor for London in 1858. Waste spewed from buildings and waste spewed from the people. And it was this inexorable brown flow that, in the summer of 1858, brought the city to its knees.
As described in Poop Culture (http://www.poopthebook.com/), the flush toilet had by 1858 become a social necessity. The elite Victorians' late 18th Century embrace of the apparatus had trickled down to their social inferiors; mid-19th Century bourgeoisie agreed that anything flushless was uncivilized. But until 1847, law and custom both held that sewers were for drainage and not for human waste -- anything bearing urine or feces was legally and morally obliged to be emptied only in the nearest cesspool. So the majority of flush toilets were plumbed to outflow not into sewers, but into pits in people's backyards.
Cesspools could contain the quantity of waste deposited via chamber pots and privies, but the gallons of water accompanying every flush of the toilet proved too much to bear. As more and more toilets were installed in the city, more and more cesspools began to overflow. Liquid sewage would leach into basements and drinking wells until reaching the nearest sewer -- which, designed for drainage, would channel the muck into the nearest waterway. And so as the summer of 1858 began, the biological and commercial feculence of London was flushed in ever-increasing volumes into the Thames.
June of 1858 was dry. Damned dry. So dry that the current of the Thames slowed almost to a stop.
June of 1858 was hot. Damned hot. So hot that the biological stew floating atop the still waters of the Thames began to putrefy.
And so began the Great Stink.
"A Stygian pool reeking with ineffable and unbearable horror," Prime Minister described it. Human and animal feces, dead dogs and cats, entrails from the slaughterhouses, rotten food, and the mechanized vomit of countless factories bobbed and bubbled while the people of London invested heavily in scented handkerchiefs. But as bad as it must have stunk, smell is something people can get used to. (And it's not like previous summers had been remembered for smelling of roses. Michael Faraday's 1855 description of the Thames (http://dbhs.wvusd.k12.ca.us/webdocs/Chem-History/Faraday-Letter.html): "The whole of the river was an opaque pale brown fluid.") No, the stench of the Thames terrified London because most Londoners genuinely believed the odor would kill them.
In 1858, both science and laymen alike subscribed to the miasma theory of disease (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miasma_theory_of_disease): that cholera, malaria, and the common cold were all caused by inhaling air infected through exposure to putrefying matter. Although Dr. John Snow had demonstrated in 1854 that cholera was caused not by miasma but by fecal contamination of water, his theories had few believers at the time of his death on June 16, 1858 -- right at the height of the Great Stink. So while John Snow was being laid to rest at Brompton Cemetery, Londoners feared for their lives of the smells arising from the Thames' clotted waters.
With Parliament right on the banks of the river, the politicians' first act was, of course, to save themselves: they ordered curtains soaked in chloride of lime to be hung in the windows. Presumably the smell of the chemical overpowered the smell of the river and thus, by their science, neutralized whatever foul demons rode the invisible airwaves of odor. For a brief time, Parliament smelled less like putrefying shit and more like the 1858 equivalent of Formula 409, and the business of running the country continued.
But when the stench proved too resilient, Parliament realized more needed to be done to ensure their own well-being. Welsh MP Owen Stanley repeated to the great body (http://books.google.com/books?id=w079yRQpkl0C&pg=PA136&dq=%22great+stink%22&sig=gDijmKbboOz9NIF-xjiersxZ0Bo) Dr. John Bredall's testimony at the Court of the Queen's Bench: "It would be dangerous to the lives of the jurymen, counsel, and witnesses to remain. It would produce malaria and perhaps typhus fever."
So, for the good of the nation, Parliament abandoned the portions of the building overlooking the river.
Well-to-do Londoners fled for the summer retreats. But working-class London stayed put, holding their breath, avoiding the river, and hoping not to die as the stench smothered the city (and, according to one source (http://edward.vam.ac.uk/activ_events/adult_resources/memory_maps/contributions/bingham/index.html), spawned an epidemic of giant flies). A few brave sanitary engineers attempted to solve the problem by dumping tons of chemicals into the Thames. Chloride of lime, chalk lime, slaked lime, and carbolic acid went in by the ton, but whatever effects these chemicals may have had were negated by the ceaseless sludge spewing from the buildings and the people. While the Great Stink was created by man, only nature could end it.
Fortunately for London, nature intervened: after a fortnight of misery and terror, the heat finally broke and the rain finally came. The Thames began to flow. The stink began to dissipate. And the politicians began to do their jobs.
Just like our government today is well aware (http://cfpub.epa.gov/npdes/home.cfm?program_id=5) of the problems of combined sewers, so too were London officials fully cognizant of their sewer problems in the years before the Great Stink. By 1847, sanitation had gotten so bad that a consolidated Metropolitan Commission of Sewers was formed to begin surveying and mapping the existing problem. (From an 1849 report (http://swopnet.com/engr/londonsewers/londontext1.html): "The smell was of the most horrible description, the air being so foul that explosions and choke damp were frequent. We were very nearly losing a whole party by choke damp, the last man being dragged out on his back through two feet of black fetid deposit in a state of insensibility.") In the eleven years prior to the Great Stink, six separate commissions evaluated 137 proposed solutions without making any tangible progress.
But in the weeks immediately following the Great Stink, Parliament rapidly authorized three million pounds for the Metropolitan Board of Works' famed engineer Joseph Bazalgette to build a massive sewer system. Bazalgette then spent the next seven years building 82 miles of intercepting sewers, 250 miles of main sewers, and 13,000 miles of local sewers to channel London's entire sewage output downstream to Barking and Crossness, where it could be released into the Thames, untreated, during periods of favorable current -- sparing London the dangers of miasmatic sewage, but leaving the question of treatment for a future generation.
Bazalgette's sewers, which became a model for combined sewers in New York City and across the west, experienced their first major overflow event on July 26, 1867, when 3.25 inches of rain fell on London. As per Bazalgette's design, emergency outflow points opened and diluted sewage and water spewed directly into the Thames.
140 years later, on October 11, 2007, 1.48 inches of rain fell on New York City, and the exact same thing happened. On the 3,200 Brooklyn acres that drain into the Red Hook Water Pollution Control Plant, 128 million gallons (http://www.google.com/search?q=%22acre+inch+of+water%22&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a) of runoff coursed into the sewers, mixing with millions of gallons of human waste already headed towards a treatment plant capable of processing just 60 million gallons per day. Emergency outflow points across the Gowanus Canal and Upper New York Bay opened up, and diluted sewage once again spewed into the water.
In London, CSOs spew 5.2 billion gallons of sewage (http://www.thamesweb.com/page.php?page_id=76&topic_id=2) into the Thames each year; New York City's waterways choke on 27 billion gallons of sewage (http://www.riverkeeper.org/campaign.php/pollution/the_facts/986) for the same reason. In both cities, and in 772 communities across America (http://cfpub.epa.gov/npdes/cso/demo.cfm?program_id=5), the problem is known but not considered urgent. London's CSOs will cost £2 billion to fix; America is looking at $4 billion (http://www.epa.gov/region01/eco/cso/index.html) for New England's problems alone. But with no movement towards resolution, the sewage will just continue to spill until another catastrophe finally occurs.
There's even an "imtdb" (internet movie turd database): http://www.poopreport.com/Fun/Content/Movies/movies.html
Holy shit, this shit is disgusting yet entertaining at the same time. No
Warning: Barf bags not included. But I assure you, there are no disgusting photos, just disgusting text. I'm quite serious.
One of the stories I'll always remember:
The Turd Terrorists Of Almaty, Kazakhstan
Posted 02.22.2005 by Vertical Grimace (http://www.poopreport.com/user/vertical_grimace) (33)
I've lived in Almaty, Kazakhstan for the past three years, and during that time I've seen more human shit in places that it didn't belong than I care to mention. Most of the time it's placed in these locations by folks who just can't be bothered to go through all the hassle of finding an appropriate place to drop off the kids. But sometimes these noxious land mines are the result of deliberate, pre-meditated turd terrorism. So you might want to print this out, kick back, grab a roll of your favorite wiping medium, and let me tell you a little story about life in the former Soviet Union stinkpot I like to call Kaka-stain. I live in one of the many grey, moribund apartment buildings that make up most of the housing units in the city. It's not even that old -- it was built in the late 80's, and at the time the people who were lucky enough to get an apartment in this building were probably saying "Nah nah nah, I got a dope crib, yo," and thumbing their noses at those suckers living in the Stalin-era communals and the other dumps that are still around to this day. But the building is pretty dilapidated now. The elevators are always breaking down and I guess the person responsible for cleaning the common areas like the staircase, the entrance, and the area where the elevators are located fucked off out of here long before I moved in last year. So trash piles up and just kind of hangs around until some old pensioner gets sick enough of seeing it and picks it up. All in all, it's a nasty-assed building, but the apartment I live in is dope and you can't beat the location. So I've lived here for almost fourteen months and just put up with the general lack of sanitation.
For a city its size, Almaty has more than its fair share of bums. I noticed in the summer that a group of them lives in the yard behind the building, but I didn't pay much attention to them since they never bothered or confronted me. Mostly I would see them digging through the trash or picking up bottles to cash in for cheap vodka or a hit of heroin or whatever. I even saw bums fucking a few times out there; they didn't care at all if anyone was watching them.
It wasn't until this winter, which has been unusually cold, that the bums became a visible -- and eventually huge -- problem. It all began one morning when I came out of my apartment to go to work. There are four units on each floor and a common area in the center where the elevators are. I had begun noticing trash, empty vodka bottles (of the cheapest sort available, around twenty cents for a pint) and discarded syringes scattered about in this area outside my door, so I was on the lookout. I don't like drug addicts and freaks hanging around where I live -- they should be living under a bridge or in a cardboard box somewhere far away from me. So that morning, when I came out and saw some feet poking out from around the corner inside the stairwell located right next to my door, I decided to check it out, since no one usually hangs out in the stairwell.
It turned out to be a quartet of the stinkiest, filthiest, and most inebriated homeless folks I'd ever laid eyes on. Three guys and a woman, all in their 30's and 40's. One guy was passed out with a needle dangling from his arm. The woman was cooking up a dandy little jolt of horse in what appeared to be a very well used and lovingly blackened spoon, oblivious to my presence for a good thirty seconds as I took in the view before me. I spoke up loudly and suddenly, startling her and almost making her drop her spoon. I told her basically to wake her friends and get the fuck out of my building or I would be coming back with the cops. They had really made themselves at home, with blankets and sacks filled with sand or something that they were using as pillows.
She said OK, no problem, she would need some time to revive her fallen comrade and gather things up, and they would be out of there in ten minutes. Figuring I had put a little scare into them, I went off to work and forgot all about it. But when I returned home hours later, I came upon the same motley group of dirtballs. They hadn't moved an inch. The guys were out cold, and the lovely young lady was swigging vodka from a bottle and scratching her crotch enthusiastically with her free hand when I burst into the stairwell. I told her in no uncertain terms that if she didn't pack up her junkie friends and get the hell out straight away, I was calling the police. She just ignored me.
Now, dealing with the local police isn't fun for anyone, including the person who called them to report something. I won't go into great detail; suffice it to say, it wasn't really an option. Likely they wouldn't have showed up for a long time anyway, if at all. By the time they would have gotten here I figured these a-holes would have moved on and all that would happen is I would get grilled and hassled by the dickhead cops because I'm a foreigner. So I bluffed them and took my cordless phone out into the stairwell, where I pretended like I was talking to the cops on the other end. In reality, I was talking into a phone that was turned off. I described the situation, said I was an executive in a big foreign company with lots of powerful friends, and told them I wanted these bastards out of my place. I thanked the imaginary dispatcher, pretended to hang up the phone, and informed the bums that the police would arrive in twenty minutes, so they better pack it up and get the hell out.
The response was a little unexpected: the 'woman,' who had pissed herself sometime while I was pretending to be on the phone, spat at me (luckily missing, though narrowly) and shouted something to the effect of, "Fuck you and your police, we're not afraid of you and we're not moving."
One of the guys had been eyeing me and stealthily edging his way toward the corner. He must have sobered up pretty good, because he produced a large hatchet which had been stashed out of sight, leapt up and lunged at me with it held high over his head, aiming to split my skull right down the middle. This all occurred in a fraction of a second. I did the only thing a sensible, athletic man of thirty-two would do in such a situation: I ran my ass off to my luckily still-open door and locked myself inside. The guy struck my metal door with his hatchet a couple times, and then silence.
I never wished to have a gun more in my life than at that moment, and I wouldn't have hesitated to use it. I still didn't want to call the cops, but my girl was on her way over and I was worried the junkies would still be in the stairwell when she arrived. In fact, they left quickly, since they quite rightly realized I wasn't going to stand for being assaulted with a fucking axe in my own home. I was really bristling with anger and felt like my personal security and that of the woman I love had been utterly compromised.
She soothed me like only she knows how to do, and my anger began to recede. The rest of the evening passed without incident, and by morning it seemed like just another tale for my scrapbook of memories from Kaka-stain. But when I opened the front door the next morning, I felt a bit of uncharacteristic resistance hindering the swing of it. I listened for the clink of bottles, which I've heard before when opening my door in the morning; that's how the bums got me pissed off in the first place, by leaving their bottles and trash right outside my door so that I knocked them over when I opened it. But this was no bottle or wad of newspaper, nor even a used syringe or goo-filled condom -- it was an enormous log of human shit, laid directly in front of my door. Swinging open the door had hopelessly smeared it across the floor; and to make matters worse, I didn't see or smell it until I had already taken a step directly into it.
To be more accurate: I saw and smelled it precisely one nanosecond before the sole of my boot made contact with the pungent muck -- hardly enough time for my brain to freak out and send a signal to my left leg saying, "Stop, fool, stop!"
Realizing what had just occur red, I froze in place, attempting to minimize the damage. My lovely girlfriend, who feigns pushiness at times in a misguided attempt to inject a little extra humor into my life, had no idea what had just happened, and gave me a jovial yet boisterous shove out the door... bad, bad idea. All my weight was balanced on the left foot, which was planted in a massive pile of shit.
If you've never stepped in shit before -- and who the fuck hasn't stepped in dog shit? But I mean a big pile of human butt butter -- you know that cartoonists should have been using dung logs instead of banana peels to represent that slippery medium that sends people, animals, and even cars flying head over heels. I don't recall having stepped in anything so slippery in my life. So due to my position in the doorway, with my weight on the foot in the shit and my girlfriend shoving me from behind, said foot came abruptly out from under me. Now I was sitting on my duff, in a brand-new knee-length cashmere overcoat, in a pile of bum turd.
My girlfriend got a whiff of the fecal aroma and shrieked. She then accused me of shitting my pants, which I vigorously and passionately denied, all the while sitting in the shit because I was so mortified I had no desire to stand and see the damage. I finally came to my senses and stood up. I fought off my desire to burst into tears (I figured even slipping in shit and getting it all over my coveted cashmere coat wasn't enough justification to bawl in front of a girl), kicked off my shoe outside the door, and hauled ass to the bathroom, where I pulled off the coat and deposited it in the tub. I wasn't ready to throw it in the trash, since I had paid over $1200 for it just a week before. I never buy things like that for myself, and I wasn't going to let those bums get to me so easily. I grabbed a trash bag from the kitchen, carefully placed the coat inside and deposited it on the balcony, where the smell wouldn't annoy me in the house.
I changed my clothes for good measure, but I still felt dirty, so I took a quick shower and put on fresh clothes. I came out of the bedroom to find my girl sitting on the couch in the entrance, still under the impression that I had shit myself. Since I like to booze it up once in a while, she had it in her head that I had gotten up in the night, not been able to find the can, and stepped out the front door to pinch a loaf. Through careful explanation and rationalization, I was finally able to convince her of the truth and nip in the bud the possibility of her leaving me for being an incontinent slob. (She's not at all shallow, but who wants to leave such things to chance?)
I cautiously opened the door and stepped over the mess to get a better look at how this act of turd terrorism had taken place. Upon inspection, it became immediately obvious that the terrorist had simply dropped trou, leaned up against my door, and let the fudge bomb slide out his or her ass, leaving a tell-tale brown stripe down the front of the door. It had spent the night like that, leaning forlornly against the door, probably lonely and cold outside the shelter of its former host's colon. To make things even worse for Mr. Chunky, he had been smeared by the door, stepped in, and fallen upon. I felt sorry for him; but he couldn't stay where he was.
For once the trash in the entryway became useful. I formed a makeshift pooper-scooper from some discarded cardboard and made quick work of the sickening mess, and then followed that up with a good washing and disinfection. Already more than an hour late for work, I fetched my shit-covered overcoat from the balcony, donned a clean coat and shoes, and ushered my girl downstairs. I retrieved my car from the garage and placed the coat, now wrapped and sealed in several bags, in the trunk. I dropped it off at the dry cleaner, warned them about the contents, and paid the girl at the counter substantially for her trouble. Then I dropped my lady off at work and drove to my office.
I was on edge all day, thrown completely off-kilter by the act o f terror. I decided not to tell anyone in my office about it, choosing instead to sit quietly in my room and avoid all contact with my colleagues.
That evening I went home as usual. Lo and behold, there were EIGHT bums in my stairwell -- all four from the previous night, plus four new ones. They were having a little party, complete with a toasty bonfire right there in the stairwell. Apparently they had been at it most of the day, since there was a substantial amount of empty bottles, syringes, and cigarette butts on the floor around them. I pretended like I didn't see them, went inside my apartment, called two of my friends, and waited. My friends arrived about fifteen minutes later. We each selected a golf club from my bag in the closet. I chose a sand wedge, Yuri a six iron, and Rudolf opted for my Ping putter. Unfortunately, all of those clubs ended up getting broken, but I saved the heads and had new shafts sent over from the States before spring.
We didn't kill anyone, but eight homeless junkies got quite a hiding that night. We threw them out in the snow one by one like cordwood when we were finished with them. I felt a great weight lifted from my shoulders, and that night I slept like a baby.
Weeks went by, and I figured we had really taught those douchebags a lesson. I cautiously opened my door every morning, just in case. I eyeballed anyone suspicious looking who even came near the entrance of the building, but saw hide nor hair of my adversaries. I woke up late at night and peered into the stairwell to try and catch anyone who may have been lurking there. Nothing. I finally relaxed, and went about life as usual.
Then, unbelievably, it happened again. It seems like you just can't break some people, even if you and a couple of your buddies try to do it with the help of a few Tommy Armour cavity-back irons. This time it was a duet: one solid log, and one runny pool of bowel sauce, smack in front of my door.
Since the last occurrence, the heating system had shut down in the entryway, and bitter cold had utterly penetrated the building. That's probably why I hadn't seen the bums -- they had moved on to better, warmer digs. But that didn't stop them from coming back and leaving me a little present. Since the temperature was about twenty below zero in there, the shit had frozen solid. I couldn't open my door far enough to see what was there and had to strike it a few times until the shit was partially shattered by the weight of the door. Most of it, however, remained firmly cemented to the floor.
I elected to call in the professionals to handle this one: two old Soviet babushkas from the building who were in charge of keeping the yard outside picked up. They didn't do much of a job of it, since they were shit-faced drunk most of the time, but I didn't really have an option at that point. I paid each of them about $5, which was more than enough to make them both happy, and when I came home I found they had somehow managed to dislodge the frozen fudge. In fact, they cleaned the entire area very well, which had me in shock.
I was thinking all day about how I could defend myself against future acts of turd terrorism, and had settled on what I thought was a pretty good solution; a wireless surveillance camera, set to record any activity outside my door. I configured it to relay the signal to my home computer, hoping to catch someone in the act.
Another few weeks went by without incident. I would wake in the night to check and see if anything had been recorded (the camera would only record if triggered by a motion sensor), but got nothing except my elderly neighbors occasionally coming out of their apartments in the ungodly early morning hours. Any hope of catching the perpetrators of these heinous-anus crimes was fading fast as spring approached -- the bands of druggie bums tend to migrate according to the seasons, and I was afraid I'd never get the fuckers. By that point I had grown a little bored of the whole thing, but revenge still smoldered somewhere deep inside me. I s topped staying home and staring at my computer screen, and started hanging out with my friends in the nightclubs more often.
One warm, rainy April night, I stumbled into my building around five AM after a night of merrymaking with the rowdies. The elevators were on the fritz again, so I had to hump it up the stairs. I rounded the last corner before my landing and nearly stepped on him in the darkness. I squinted in the dimness of the stairwell, and as my eyes adjusted to the light I realized I was staring at the motherfucker who had attacked me with a hatchet. He looked like the kind of guy who fit the profile of a turd terrorist -- at least in my mind. Anyway, it didn't matter at that point, since I had about a liter of booze in me and a mean streak that rivaled the brown streak which had been left on my door the first time around.
I clearly recall stepping over the guy fast asleep on the landing, unlocking my door, and fetching a roll of paper towels from the kitchen table. I changed into a pair of shorts and a t-shirt and grabbed a knife from the kitchen, just in case. I then stepped back out into the stairwell, dropped my shorts and boxers, hovered over the junkie, and calmly deposited the contents of my colon on his midsection.
He never moved or made a sound as I floated above him for more than a minute, firing chunks of shit and watery feces all over him. I wiped my ass with the paper towel, laid it on his stomach, and went back inside my apartment. Exhausted from a lot of liquor and the ecstasy of righteous revenge, I fell fast asleep.
I slept through my alarm the next morning and finally dragged my hung-over ass out of bed around two PM. It took about ten minutes for me to sort out whether my recollection of the night before had been a dream or reality. I battled with my brain for what seemed like an eternity, and finally decided I had to see for myself. I stealthily unlocked the door and peered into the stairwell... no one there. I noiselessly tiptoed to the threshold and peered down at the landing... nothing there.
Nothing, that is, except for some splatters of shit and a wad of very used paper towel. I smiled to myself, went back inside, and called the babushkas who had cleaned up the shitsicles several weeks before. I had a job for them, and I hoped it would be their last.
As it turned out, it was. I haven't seen any junkies around here for almost a year. The moral I learned from this was: shit must be fought with shit. No choice. An eye for an eye, a turd for a turd. And if you are mad enough to shit on someone, you are a force to be reckoned with. Forget the Hot Carl; it'll always be the Hot Ivan to me, for as long as I live.
One of the intellectual craps:
The Great Stink: When England Was Disgusting (And Why America's Rivers Still Are)
Posted 10.15.2007 by Dave (http://www.poopreport.com/user/dave) (11808)
On the morning of August 8, three inches of rain fell on Brooklyn. On the 3,200 Brooklyn acres that drain into the Red Hook Water Pollution Control Plant, 260 million gallons of runoff coursed into the sewers, mixing with millions of gallons of human waste already headed towards a treatment plant capable of processing only 60 million gallons per day. When flow exceeds capacity by that much, the only choice is to channel it all, untreated, into the waterways. And so emergency outflow points in Brooklyn's Gowanus Canal and across Upper New York Bay began to ejaculate diluted sewage.
But aside from homeowners whose basements were flooded by Gowanus sewage and beachgoers who swam in feces the next day, few people paid attention to the sewer overflows. After all, New York City averages 53 combined sewer overflows (CSOs) a year, and 772 American communities have combined wastewater and rainwater sewers that overflow during heavy rains. But since CSOs rarely make the news and few politicians want to stake political capital on sewers, the political will to fix them probably won't appear until the problem becomes a catastrophe.
This is the story of one such catastrophe: a stench so vile that it changed the course of human sanitation.
London in 1858 was not a pleasant place for people who enjoyed breathing through their nose. The Industrial Revolution had attracted three million fortune-seekers to the big city, turning housing into a two-pronged competition: landlords tried to see how many times they could subdivide a flat and tenants tried to see how many people they could pack into each one. Every inch of real estate not reserved for someone sleeping was appropriated by the machinery of capitalism -- neighborhoods teemed with tanneries, breweries, soap factories, glue works, slaughterhouses, laundries, and bone boilers, and pollution spewed into the skies and streets and sewers from each one.
Spewing waste: that's an excellent metaphor for London in 1858. Waste spewed from buildings and waste spewed from the people. And it was this inexorable brown flow that, in the summer of 1858, brought the city to its knees.
As described in Poop Culture (http://www.poopthebook.com/), the flush toilet had by 1858 become a social necessity. The elite Victorians' late 18th Century embrace of the apparatus had trickled down to their social inferiors; mid-19th Century bourgeoisie agreed that anything flushless was uncivilized. But until 1847, law and custom both held that sewers were for drainage and not for human waste -- anything bearing urine or feces was legally and morally obliged to be emptied only in the nearest cesspool. So the majority of flush toilets were plumbed to outflow not into sewers, but into pits in people's backyards.
Cesspools could contain the quantity of waste deposited via chamber pots and privies, but the gallons of water accompanying every flush of the toilet proved too much to bear. As more and more toilets were installed in the city, more and more cesspools began to overflow. Liquid sewage would leach into basements and drinking wells until reaching the nearest sewer -- which, designed for drainage, would channel the muck into the nearest waterway. And so as the summer of 1858 began, the biological and commercial feculence of London was flushed in ever-increasing volumes into the Thames.
June of 1858 was dry. Damned dry. So dry that the current of the Thames slowed almost to a stop.
June of 1858 was hot. Damned hot. So hot that the biological stew floating atop the still waters of the Thames began to putrefy.
And so began the Great Stink.
"A Stygian pool reeking with ineffable and unbearable horror," Prime Minister described it. Human and animal feces, dead dogs and cats, entrails from the slaughterhouses, rotten food, and the mechanized vomit of countless factories bobbed and bubbled while the people of London invested heavily in scented handkerchiefs. But as bad as it must have stunk, smell is something people can get used to. (And it's not like previous summers had been remembered for smelling of roses. Michael Faraday's 1855 description of the Thames (http://dbhs.wvusd.k12.ca.us/webdocs/Chem-History/Faraday-Letter.html): "The whole of the river was an opaque pale brown fluid.") No, the stench of the Thames terrified London because most Londoners genuinely believed the odor would kill them.
In 1858, both science and laymen alike subscribed to the miasma theory of disease (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miasma_theory_of_disease): that cholera, malaria, and the common cold were all caused by inhaling air infected through exposure to putrefying matter. Although Dr. John Snow had demonstrated in 1854 that cholera was caused not by miasma but by fecal contamination of water, his theories had few believers at the time of his death on June 16, 1858 -- right at the height of the Great Stink. So while John Snow was being laid to rest at Brompton Cemetery, Londoners feared for their lives of the smells arising from the Thames' clotted waters.
With Parliament right on the banks of the river, the politicians' first act was, of course, to save themselves: they ordered curtains soaked in chloride of lime to be hung in the windows. Presumably the smell of the chemical overpowered the smell of the river and thus, by their science, neutralized whatever foul demons rode the invisible airwaves of odor. For a brief time, Parliament smelled less like putrefying shit and more like the 1858 equivalent of Formula 409, and the business of running the country continued.
But when the stench proved too resilient, Parliament realized more needed to be done to ensure their own well-being. Welsh MP Owen Stanley repeated to the great body (http://books.google.com/books?id=w079yRQpkl0C&pg=PA136&dq=%22great+stink%22&sig=gDijmKbboOz9NIF-xjiersxZ0Bo) Dr. John Bredall's testimony at the Court of the Queen's Bench: "It would be dangerous to the lives of the jurymen, counsel, and witnesses to remain. It would produce malaria and perhaps typhus fever."
So, for the good of the nation, Parliament abandoned the portions of the building overlooking the river.
Well-to-do Londoners fled for the summer retreats. But working-class London stayed put, holding their breath, avoiding the river, and hoping not to die as the stench smothered the city (and, according to one source (http://edward.vam.ac.uk/activ_events/adult_resources/memory_maps/contributions/bingham/index.html), spawned an epidemic of giant flies). A few brave sanitary engineers attempted to solve the problem by dumping tons of chemicals into the Thames. Chloride of lime, chalk lime, slaked lime, and carbolic acid went in by the ton, but whatever effects these chemicals may have had were negated by the ceaseless sludge spewing from the buildings and the people. While the Great Stink was created by man, only nature could end it.
Fortunately for London, nature intervened: after a fortnight of misery and terror, the heat finally broke and the rain finally came. The Thames began to flow. The stink began to dissipate. And the politicians began to do their jobs.
Just like our government today is well aware (http://cfpub.epa.gov/npdes/home.cfm?program_id=5) of the problems of combined sewers, so too were London officials fully cognizant of their sewer problems in the years before the Great Stink. By 1847, sanitation had gotten so bad that a consolidated Metropolitan Commission of Sewers was formed to begin surveying and mapping the existing problem. (From an 1849 report (http://swopnet.com/engr/londonsewers/londontext1.html): "The smell was of the most horrible description, the air being so foul that explosions and choke damp were frequent. We were very nearly losing a whole party by choke damp, the last man being dragged out on his back through two feet of black fetid deposit in a state of insensibility.") In the eleven years prior to the Great Stink, six separate commissions evaluated 137 proposed solutions without making any tangible progress.
But in the weeks immediately following the Great Stink, Parliament rapidly authorized three million pounds for the Metropolitan Board of Works' famed engineer Joseph Bazalgette to build a massive sewer system. Bazalgette then spent the next seven years building 82 miles of intercepting sewers, 250 miles of main sewers, and 13,000 miles of local sewers to channel London's entire sewage output downstream to Barking and Crossness, where it could be released into the Thames, untreated, during periods of favorable current -- sparing London the dangers of miasmatic sewage, but leaving the question of treatment for a future generation.
Bazalgette's sewers, which became a model for combined sewers in New York City and across the west, experienced their first major overflow event on July 26, 1867, when 3.25 inches of rain fell on London. As per Bazalgette's design, emergency outflow points opened and diluted sewage and water spewed directly into the Thames.
140 years later, on October 11, 2007, 1.48 inches of rain fell on New York City, and the exact same thing happened. On the 3,200 Brooklyn acres that drain into the Red Hook Water Pollution Control Plant, 128 million gallons (http://www.google.com/search?q=%22acre+inch+of+water%22&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a) of runoff coursed into the sewers, mixing with millions of gallons of human waste already headed towards a treatment plant capable of processing just 60 million gallons per day. Emergency outflow points across the Gowanus Canal and Upper New York Bay opened up, and diluted sewage once again spewed into the water.
In London, CSOs spew 5.2 billion gallons of sewage (http://www.thamesweb.com/page.php?page_id=76&topic_id=2) into the Thames each year; New York City's waterways choke on 27 billion gallons of sewage (http://www.riverkeeper.org/campaign.php/pollution/the_facts/986) for the same reason. In both cities, and in 772 communities across America (http://cfpub.epa.gov/npdes/cso/demo.cfm?program_id=5), the problem is known but not considered urgent. London's CSOs will cost £2 billion to fix; America is looking at $4 billion (http://www.epa.gov/region01/eco/cso/index.html) for New England's problems alone. But with no movement towards resolution, the sewage will just continue to spill until another catastrophe finally occurs.
There's even an "imtdb" (internet movie turd database): http://www.poopreport.com/Fun/Content/Movies/movies.html
Holy shit, this shit is disgusting yet entertaining at the same time. No