The DP, beagle and I crashed at a friend’s place in NYC two nights ago on the way home from the Cape. Our friend lives in an apartment building with a very strange problem. He just got a formal letter from the building manager:
I am writing because one tenant is creating a truly ridiculous problem. We have repeatedly found used toilet paper at the bottom of the air shaft outside the window of the lowest apartments in the line. The only logical explanation seems to be that someone is throwing this used toilet paper out of their window. Whoever is doing this please stop at once. Not only is this unfair to the building staff who then have to clean it up, this is a terrible health hazard that could easily cause your neighbors to become sick. If the problem is that someone’s plumbing is not working properly we would be happy to fix it if you inform me that there is a problem. But if this problem continues I will install a video camera looking down the shaft and have whoever is responsible evicted.
If you peer out the window into the courtyard in the middle of the building, it’s festooned with white paper blobs with brown streaks – the paper soon turns into mush with rain. Existential statement? A response to bad plumbing? Or New York City?
BETTER LATE THAN NEVER: “Perhaps today’s astounding Tom DeLay quote … about how there’s no way to cut the federal budget will offer a useful reminder to conservatives that while they may be aligned with Republican Congressional politicians, Republican Congressional politicians are just that — politicians first. There is too often a rush on to defend any and every GOP pol by conservative bloggers and e-mailers on the grounds that if they’re being attacked by the MSM, they’re victims of injustice. Sometimes, though, they’re just … indefensible.” – John Podhoretz, National Review Online. Like, er, when they cannot cope with a major urban catastrophe four years after 9/11?
The Dish 