#oneaday Day 657: Drain Blaster

After over 4,500 posts on this blog (and another 2,300 or so on MoeGamer), it will probably not surprise you to learn that I sometimes have difficulty thinking of something new to write about. Indeed, there are a number of topics I have written about multiple times, often without realising it — and often with inadvertently using some of the exact same arguments and phrases each time I do so. At least nobody can say I'm inconsistent in the way I do things.

With that in mind, and given that this is a personal blog, it stands to reason that I should probably start talking about weird, hyper-niche things that, statistically speaking, very few people probably give a shit about. But if Chris "Papapishu" Person's work over on Aftermath is anything to go by, there will always be an odd little audience who are very much into weird, hyper-niche things.

I guess part of the reason I tend to hold off on writing about weird, hyper-niche things is worrying about whether or not I will actually be able to fill a convincing blog post on the subject, but, well, I've taken care of about half of what I consider the "bare minimum" for each day with this preamble, and thus I now feel suitably equipped to actually tell you what I want to talk about.

Today I would like to tell you about our toilet plunger.

A plunger is one of those things that you don't really think about needing until it's too late. At least, I've always been that way; I am fortunate in the fact that my wife likes to be prepared for all sorts of eventualities, and thus she is the sort of person to purchase a toilet plunger in the anticipation that we might need one at some point.

But my wife didn't buy just any old plunger. Oh, no. She bought a Drain Blaster.

You might think that looks quite like a normal plunger, and you would be partially right; like a regular old plunger it has the big rubber thing that you put over the hole in the bog, along with a smaller head for dealing with, presumably, plugholes. (I have only ever used it for the toilet.)

Where a Drain Blaster differs from a regular plunger may well already be apparent from the picture above, but just in case it isn't: it's all in that thick cylinder of a body, and the handle above it. Because you can pull that handle out to fill the cylinder with air, and then blast the air back out by plunging the handle back in.

And you know what? It does an amazing job of unblocking a toilet. I don't really know how one uses a regular plunger for the same job other than just sort of… plunging it in there and hoping for the best, but with the Drain Blaster it really is as simple as putting the rubber bit over the hole in the toilet, pulling up the handle and pumping it a few times until you hear everything proceed on its merry way down your soil pipe. I am yet to encounter a blocked toilet that has been able to stand up to even the briefest assault from a Drain Blaster, and, as someone who blocks the toilet more frequently than he would perhaps like to admit, I am exceedingly grateful that, at some point in the past, my wife decided to go hard on our choice of plunger.

I am reminded of a legendary group text (it may have been an MSN Messenger conversation, given the era) from among my friendship group at university, when one of our number (not me, surprisingly) admitted that he had produced a poo so formidable that he absolutely could not get rid of it. It eventually took several kettlefuls of boiling water to break up the beast enough for it to finally vacate the premises, and he chronicled the entire process, which was unfolding late at night when, being university students, many of us could be relied upon to be a little bit tipsy and thus very receptive to such a saga. Thankfully this was an age before smartphones, so there were no pictures involved, but the entire process was chronicled in exhaustive detail. I will never forget it.

I mention this because I wonder how different his experiences would have been if he had a Drain Blaster. I don't even know if Drain Blasters existed back then, though given that the device is essentially a bike pump with a plunger head, I would be surprised if they didn't. Could the sheer volume of this legendary turd stand up to the relentless assault of a Drain Blaster, or would the boiling water still be necessary? I guess we will never know.

Anyway, that's what I wanted to talk about today. If you read all of that… uh… well done, I guess?

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#oneaday Day 788: From the Depths of the Subconscious

Analysing your dreams can probably tell you a lot about yourself. If that's the case, though, I'm not sure I want to know what my most recent vivid imaginings say.

I dream best in the morning after I've woken up once. At least, those are the dreams I remember. If I wake up when Andie leaves for work and promptly fall back asleep again (which, to be perfectly honest, I usually do) then I'll often have incredibly vivid dreams which, more to the point, I tend to remember pretty clearly. They're certainly not conscious imaginings, because there's no way I'd choose to think of a lot of the things that flit through my mind. Rather, it appears to be a completely automatic process, presumably based on anxieties or thoughts already stuck in my head.

This morning, these bizarre "snooze dreams" were — and I apologise for what I'm about to recount — rather lavatorial in nature. To begin with, I found myself sitting on a toilet in an upstairs hallway of a house. It wasn't my real-life house, though I think it might have been my own house in the dream. Quite why there was a toilet in the upstairs hallway was anyone's guess. And quite why I was sitting on it when the house was clearly playing host to a large party is an even bigger mystery.

Despite the fact I had clearly just had a dump in front of all the passing partygoers — most of whom seemed oblivious to my presence and activities — for some reason (and again, I apologise) I found myself unable to… uhh… "clean up", as it were. I found myself panicking and wishing all these people weren't in my house, screaming at them to get out of the way, but still no-one paid me any heed.

I ran downstairs and found myself in the house I lived in for my fourth year of university. I knew there was a nice, quiet toilet in the back where I could complete my business, so I opened the door. I found a toilet all right, but it wasn't the one I was expecting. Rather, it was in a large, L-shaped room whose walls and floor were all made of ceramic tiles. There was no ceiling to the room, and outside I could see that we appeared to be floating in space. Worse, there was no bog roll here, either, only three circular red buttons next to the toilet.

I left, and the subsequent journey was a blur, but I ended up in what appeared to be an aeroplane bathroom, albeit one with a sloping roof that met the wall behind the toilet, and a large skylight in it. When standing in front of the toilet, I could look out through the skylight, and I saw that we were in some sort of rural area. Outside the skylight, men in peculiar costumes were being shepherded away by strange figures I can't remember any details about. For some reason, I thought nothing of this strange and slightly sinister behaviour, because I had more pressing matters on my mind.

There was a toilet paper dispenser on the wall, so I pulled the handle to dispense some, but the string of sheets went down a small hole underneath the dispenser. When I retrieved the paper from the hole, it was completely covered in a weird black sludge which was then all over my hand. After going "urgh" for a little while, I simply washed it off, finally wiped my arse (noting with some surprise that my underpants had not been soiled despite all the running around) and then woke up slightly worried that I might have shat myself in my sleep. (I hadn't.)

This particular incident follows a long stream of other bizarre "snooze dreams" I've had which include being unable to go through with a sexual encounter because I didn't have the sheet music for it; starting to read the TV Tropes page for my own life and being literally unable to look away from it; and a particularly unpleasant one where I lived in a big house with all my friends and we all suddenly started hating each other for no apparent reason.

My subconscious is fucked, basically. Oh well, at least it keeps things interesting. And the fact I can remember all this nonsense gives me good fodder for when I actually do want to do something creative and imaginative… though I can't see a novel about someone who might have shat himself catching on, really.

#oneaday Day 558: Poo

Andie reckoned I wouldn't write a blog post about poo. So here I am proving her wrong.

The word "poo" is one of those ones that never fails to make me smile in a childish manner. It's not a scientific word in the slightest, and it's right up there with "wee" in the childish stakes — only, for whatever reason, talking about poo tends to be more of a taboo than talking about wee. I'm not sure why this is — but it just is.

Americans, in my experience, tend to use the word "poop" more than "poo". I recall an episode of Friends where the word "poo" came up quite a bit and it just sounded odd coming out of Matthew Perry's mouth. The word "poo", not actual poo.

The act of pooing is, of course, both unpleasant for others to witness and immensely satisfying for the person doing it. As a gross generalisation (in every sense of the word "gross") gentlemen appear to enjoy a good poo rather more than the ladies, though there are, of course, exceptions. For the most part, though, gentlemen are certainly more prone to spending a great deal more time pooing than the ladies.

There are doubtless a variety of reasons for this, possibly the fact that being alone in the bathroom with your pants around your ankles is one of the only times that you're truly alone and can sit there with your thoughts. It's probably not a coincidence that Rodin's famous statue The Thinker is sat in a distinctly pooing-like position. After all, what better time is there to get all the shit (no pun intended) together in your head than a time when you really can't be disturbed by other people? Exactly. Best to enter the bathroom with your thoughts for company.

Or, indeed, an iPhone and a copy of Bejeweled Blitz.

I sometimes wonder if iPhone game designers did their playtesting on the toilet, because the very best iPhone games are friendly to toilet-play sessions. Bejeweled Blitz, for example, takes place in one minute chunks, if you'll pardon the expression. A level of Angry Birds takes probably less than a minute to get through. And titles like 100 Rogues are easy to stop at any time when you, you know, stop.

So let's praise the act of pooing. Without it, it's entirely possible many of the great inventions of our time wouldn't have come to be. Life's great thinkers doubtless came up with their various theories of life, the universe and everything while pinching off a loaf. And surely many's the author struck with a wave of inspiration while dropping the kids off at the pool.

Pooing, then: don't be ashamed. Be proud of your poos and what you accomplish during them, even if it's just another ridiculous high score in Bejeweled Blitz. Because seriously, the alternative is just staring at a blank wall, which is just no fun at all.

Poo!

(Enough.)