Friday, April 11, 2008

Colossus! Lochness. Facer.

Via beverage enthusiast and Kiwi photoblogger Ed Wozniak:


Apparently this excellent picture was taken in one of the many Greco-Scottish bars that populate the Boston area. Ed has provided few details, and is only able to communicate via yes-or-no button, so my professional interpretation of this message is mostly conjecture drawn from my extensive history of stall study.

The first element that intrigues me is "Dead Arm" in the top left corner. If that were truly the case, then with what was the author writing? The script is quite stylized, suggesting a level of marker control beyond the ability of the mouth or anus, so I can only deduce that the man with the dead arm employed a second gentleman to create his plaintive message (and probably help him with wiping).

The main attraction here, though, is, of course, "Colossus! Lochness. Facer." This cryptic inscription contains multitudes. Colossus is both a wonder of the ancient world and a character from the X-Men. Lochness may refer to the Scottish lake ("Loch Ness," or "Lake Noose") rumored to harbor a cartoon dinosaur (named Barney), but it's more likely that, in this case, it's being used as an adjective describing a person or object's level of similarity to a generic Scottish lake. Facer is a Navajo code word that translates to "the previous two words are obviously related in a way that totally makes sense but doesn't need to be explicitly explained."

So thank you, Mr. Wozniak, for providing such a compelling picture on which to train my expert stallographic eye. This experience has been so invigorating that it is therefore, with an open mind and a heavy heart, that I welcome and encourage other amateur stall-0-nauts to submit photos for collaborative interpretation. You tell me what you think is going on in the message, and I'll tell you why you're wrong. Welcome to academia!

Thursday, April 10, 2008

Churchill

To paraphrase the great American war hero Winston Churchill, reports of the death of this blog have been greatly exaggerated, but you'll still be ugly tomorrow. Also, I'm drunk.

I've been unable to provide consistent posting due to several factors:
  1. I'm exceptionally lazy.
  2. I've been staying with a Luddite friend who prohibits the use of electronic equipment in his makeshift hovel.
  3. When I use the intertubes at Starbucks, by the time I'm halfway through my iced coffee (my all-time least favorite drink (which I now drink several times a day)), I'm too jittery and argumentative to type correctly or not be escorted out of the building.
  4. I lost both typing hands in two separate but consecutive hand-shaking accidents (apparently not as uncommon as the Bureau of Statistics would have you believe!).
Problems 2-4 will be rectified within the next few days, as I have secured inexpensive prosthetics as well a domicile in the flats of East Hollywood, and will soon hole myself up hermitlike to pen angry screeds from my darkened bungalow. If you can hang on until then, I promise to continue the travelogue to its logical completion in a porta-potty in the Hollywood Hills.

Monday, April 7, 2008

Comments

I just wanted to point out that leaving a comment on this blog does not automatically infect you with SARS, as recent urban legends seem to suggest. If you leave a signed comment, you're automatically entered in the Publishers Clearing House sweepstakes, and if you leave an anonymous comment, you will be exposed to nothing more infectious than chlamydia, which, as you surely know, is often treatable.

Update 9:35 PM - I just realized that anonymous comments weren't actually enabled (until now), making the above plea for attention all the more pathetic.

Glory



I am aware that this is not a picture of a message, but I found it potentially interesting enough to post nonetheless. Feel free to disagree. Despite my confusion in Kentucky, I actually have no personal experience with the phenomenon of the so-called "glory hole," but my pseudoarchaeological education leads me to believe that I may have encountered the remains of one in this stall at mile 111 of Interstate 44 in Missouri. It is clear that a roundish hole in the wall has been patched with some sort of whitish putty (or some other organic or inorganic substance). This hole, in its heyday, could have served many purposes. It was most likely created by a fellow pseudoanthropologist to secretly observe the stall habits of the human male. Another possibility is that it functioned as a release valve if the stall was to fill with liquid beyond a designated level, like in a bathtub. A third option is the likelihood that men who suspected they suffered from STDs could be examined through the hole by a licensed medical professional in true anonymity, much like a Catholic confessional (minus all the tawdry sex).

Whether it was one or a combination of these functions that this mysterious hole provided during its era of operation we can only guess. But I hope my exploration of these possibilities has proven enlightening in some manner.

Now please excuse me, as I have to go stick my cock through a hole in a wall to get sucked off by some random dude.

Tease

New post in the morning. I shall now rest my weary head and dream of men, toilets, and the glorious intersection of the twain.

Saturday, April 5, 2008

Jesus is Lord of Aid Fuckers



"Jesus" presumably refers to the fictional antihero of the 1977 British miniseries entitled Jesus of Nazareth, shown on American television every year around the time of Passover. The "Deleted Scenes" section of the DVD release indicates that the "Aid Fuckers" reference comes from a riveting segment of the Sermon on the Mount as originally performed by Robert Powell (as "Jesus") that director Franco Zeffirelli inexplicably left on the cutting-room floor. Therefore I think it's reasonable to assume that a savvy cinephile scratched this message in protest against what he felt were Zeffirelli's timid editing decisions. If these stirring words, written in the stall of a men's room at mile 111 of Interstate 44 in Missouri, do not fall on deaf eyes, perhaps a future "Director's Cut" will provide Powell's performance of the full Sermon as originally written by Zeffirelli collaborator and A Clockwork Orange author Anthony Burgess.

Silver Lake

I've safely arrived at my destination, and I am tired, but I still have more than half a country's worth of stalls about which to write (the unit to measure stall amounts is called the "country"). I will begin to finish this thankless task in the morning. There are no jokes is apparently one joke in this post.

Friday, April 4, 2008

More Thoughts on Cat Condoms

Another possibility demanding the urgency of condom use among cats is an outbreak of feline immunodeficiency virus, known best by its technical name, Kitty Cat AIDS. While sexual activity is one vector of transmission, the virus can also be spread through scratches, bite wounds, and snuggling. Such casual transmission would, of course, require the condom to cover not only the cat's genitals, but, in fact, the entire cat. While the enormous condoms that I personally require (but do not use, since pregnancy prevention is a woman's concern, and acquiring a fatal sexual disease could never happen to me) could easily fit a cat (and often do), not all men have been endowed with a cat-sized (and shaped) penis, so some men may need to purchase a different condom to protect their pussy. Cats native to Southern Indiana must be rather small because the condoms specifically indicated for cat use were advertised for their "Slimmer Fit."

Housekeeping III - Picture Cropping

This damned electric printing press is cropping the right sides of my pictures against my will. While several posts ago I bravely mustered a laissez-faire attitude towards the random formatting, shrugging it off as God's will, I naggingly worry that if I do not stop this atrocity in its tracks, before long it will be cropping my family. Thus, going forward, I will be attempting to correct it through such tried and true techniques as HTML troubleshooting, opium eating, and self-mutilation. Please bear with me through this difficult time.

Thursday, April 3, 2008

Feline Prophylactics



If you look closely at this out-of-focus and unpostworthy photograph (which would indict me as a failure and a hack had that not already been made voluminously clear), you'll see that some thoughtful gentleman went to the trouble of blacking out several letters on the second and third Hygeia condom labels, altering the content of the message. The result: "1 Premium Cat Condom." Southern Indiana must be suffering quite the epic bout of feline promiscuity if men are depositing three quarters at a time to buy condoms for their cats. I did, however, notice a plethora of roadside billboards advertising vasectomy reversals, so perhaps neutered cats, having achieved financial independence through their unprecedented success in the theater, are taking advantage of those services. I should mention that I did not see a single cat during my visit to the Sunoco at exit 29 of Interstate 64 (where this picture was taken), but if I had, I would have demanded he use protection.

Wednesday, April 2, 2008

Kentucky Looks Outward

An industrious fellow named Howard Johnson built a two-story hotel on Route 66 in Flagstaff, Arizona, and I write to you from within it (room 205, to be exact). Several days ago (I have fallen tragically behind on the delivery of my findings), I drove through Kentucky, where all the grass is blue and the horses all play basketball. Considering the great variety and nonsensicality of the local culture, I was surprised to find such a worldly potpourri of issues discussed on the walls of the men's room stall at the rest stop at mile 63 of Interstate 70.

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This is quite possibly a remnant from the Revolutionary War, when anger at the Crown reached its zenith and impudent Colonial scribes penned fiery pamphlets bemoaning the immense suckitude of the United Kingdom of Britain.

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An ancient and sacred symbol dating from the Neolithic period, this particular image, called a swastika, denotes good luck. Mischievously appropriated for a short time by a pesky band of ne'er-do-wells, it has apparently reclaimed its rightful place as an emblem of peace and magnanimity in many parts of the rural American South.

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Not often do I receive the great honor of following an honest-to-Goodness celebrity into the stall, but such was clearly the case in Kentucky! As you can see from the above picture, I was obviously preceded by none other than Democratic presidential candidate and black separatist Muslim Barack Hussein Obama! Truly, hope springs eternal in the human bowel.

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Drunk with excitement from the Obama near-miss (and eager to report my findings to the Department of Homeland Security), I was in the process of leaving the stall when my good eye caught a familiar sight scrawled faintly into the pale yellow paint. Could it be? Yes! The initials of my most elusive quarry, KKK himself! What a rich yield had this stall provided me! I should have known when I saw the swastika that luck was on my side, and KKK would not be far behind, or ahead, as the case may have been. And as goes KKK, so go I. Onward!

Brief Update from Albuquerque



I write you from a Starbucks in Albuquerque, New Mexico, daintily sipping an iced coffee, which, I must admit, tastes terrible, and I loathe myself for drinking it. The mo-tel in which I slept last night (room 111, Americana Motel, Tucumcari, NM) had not yet been connected via a series of tubes to any of the Internets, thus I was unable to continue my blogtastic journey into the heart of the American stallmonger. I have, however, continued to accumulate stunning photographic evidence, and I pledge to share it with you this coming eve. Take heart, pitiable cyberdenizens, for your bottomless appetites for trivial pseudo-anthropology shall soon be temporarily satiated once again.