20 November 2013 (14:53 UTC-07 Tango)/16 Muharram 1435/29 Aban 1392/18 Gui-Hai (10th month) 4711

The words crapper and crap, for that matter, are ligit.  They come from the name of a real person.  Thomas Crapper was a successful British plumber who was incorrectly associated with inventing the modern flush toilet.

The idea of a flushing toilet is ancient.  Archeologists say the first example was created for the King Minos more than 2800 years ago.  The first patent for a modern flushing toilet went to Alexander Cummings in 1775.  The first use of indoor plumbing and flush toilets was in 1825 by a hotel in Boston, Massachusetts.  But toilets back then were for the elites.  It wasn’t until after 1910 that flushing toilets took on a design similar to current toilets, and became affordable for us commoners.

And it wasn’t until after the Second World War that most commoner families of the Western World got indoor flush toilets.  I was in Scotland in 1991 and visited a museum dedicated to the history of sewage.  It even had a full size replica of a 1800s sewer system complete with stinking crap and piss (of course it was replicated, but who’d of thought somebody could be paid to make models of craps, other than those joke crap toys)!  But what awakened me to the fact that we take our crappers for granted was a small display that pointed out that most Scottish homes didn’t have indoor plumbing, or toilets, until after the 1950s!

Then you have to wonder at the Japanese, for taking toilets to the extreme.  Apparently the Japanese are so afraid of their rear ends they created toilets that blast their asses with water jets so they don’t have to wipe.  The latest Japanese toilets provide imaging systems and soothing female computer voices to tell them if they still have a nasty ass, and then it blasts them again.  (there are some people in the U.S. that are the same way and will pay top dollar for a robot toilet from Japan)

By the way the first production toilet paper wasn’t invented until 1857.   And the technology to make modern toilet brushes was used to create the first artificial Xmas tree, in the 1930s, thus linking Xmas and toilet cleaning.

Now to get serious,  the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) marked 19 November as World Toilet Day.  They want people to be aware of the major impact toilets have on reducing disease.  Even so, UNICEF says one reason for the rise of new diseases is the fact that (in their estimation) as many as 2-thousand children die every day because they live in areas that have no toilets, or way of handling sewage: “Access to toilets remains the unmentionable, shameful secret for even some very prosperous countries.  But its invisibility doesn’t make it harmless; in fact it is quite the reverse. Lack of access to toilets is quite literally killing children, making adults sick…”–Sanjay Wijesekera, UNICEF Water, Sanitation and Hygiene (WASH)

So those of us commoners who have toilets should be proud, and thankful, for they truly are our porcelain thrones!