Beyond the Porcelain Throne: Uncovering the Unexpected in Bathroom Stories

0:10 Welcome to the Strange History Podcast, where we talk about the weird and the wonderful. Today we are going to be talking about bathroom news. Let's talk about a brush with the law. In December of twenty thirteen, violent clashes broke out on the streets of Hamburg, Germany. It broke out between German police and protesters. Among the protesters beasts a stop and search law that allowed cops to confiscate anything they wanted. The protests took a silly turn after a twenty three second video surfaced on YouTube that showed a hooded man being detained by the police.

0:46 They pinned him up against the wall, lifted his shirt, and they confiscated a toilet brush. Then they arrested him. It's unclear why the man was carrying a toilet brush, but his arrest really inspired the protesters. The next night, dozens of angry Hamburgers people living in Hamburg hit the streets with their own toilet brushes. Some in the press were calling at the toilet brush Revolution, a phrase that sadly never caught on according to the World Bulletin. In addition to flashing their toilet brushes at police officers, some of the Hamburgers adopted a new way to protest the stop and search measures by carrying ridiculous items in their bags, such as cucumbers and dirty underwear.

1:26 Some more toilet news or bathroom news, I should say, we're going to talk about a message from the past. In July of twenty eighteen, Alex and jess Moni were remodeling their bathroom in San Jose, California, when they discovered a note hidden behind a wall that read, we remodeled this bathroom in nineteen ninety five. If you're reading this, that means that you're remodeling the bathroom again. What's wrong with the way that we did it? Companying the note was a photograph of the previous owners.

1:54 Beneath that was a photo of the owner's pet rabbit. Amused, the Monies tweeted a photo of the note and the rabbit, and the tweet went viral, amassing tens of thousands of shares, even one from comedian Sarah Silverman. The Monies were interviewed by NBC. It must have been a slow news day, and Alex had a message to the former owners, thank you for the note. Gave us a lot of smiles. Your bathroom was great, Sorry for messing with it. Next, we're going to talk about bath and breakfast, proving that the tiny home craze is getting a bit out of hand.

2:25 A two hundred square foot apartment for rent in Saint Louis, Missouri, made the news in twenty eighteen for its odd floor layout. The bathroom in the kitchen comprised the same tiny room. The stove is next to the kitchen sink, which is next to the toilet, which is next to the bathtub, which is right across from the stove. The good news, if you have long arms, you can flip your burgers while taking a shower. The bad news, you'll need to space out your cooking and going times. The ad for the tiny apartment, which passed all city inspections rents for a low five twenty five a month.

2:58 It drew dozens of queries and according to the landlord, the new tenant is very happy. Next, we're going to talk about a toilet snake. It's one of those things where you think it can't actually happen, said Animal Control supervisor Rebecca Franklin, but now it has. What happened in July of twenty eighteen, a ball python poked its seat out of John Hopper's toilet in Virginia Beach, Virginia. I'm sorry that would have been it for me. I had to burn the house down. But at first Hopper wasn't even sure the snake was real.

3:29 When I saw the tongue, he told the newspeople, I was like, Wow. Although pythons aren't venomous, they kill their prey by squeezing all the air out of it. Hopper was lucky that he didn't find out about the toilet snake the hard way. Popper and his roommate carefully used a fishing pole and some string to lasso a two and a half foot snake and pulled it out of there. Then they called animal control to help track down the python's owners, who hadn't seen their pet for two weeks. Now we're going to talk about the unfleshables.

3:57 They call it the fatberg. It was twenty three feet long and weigh a ton. It looked like a giant black monster from the underworld. What was it made of? Thousands of used wet wipes held together by fat and sewage workers use a crane to extract half the fat bird from a clogged sewer. Line, and the other half had to be removed by hand. This particular fat bird came out of the bowels of a neighborhood in New South Wales, Australia in twenty sixteen, but there are more of them growing out there, perhaps even one below you.

4:28 NSW utility spokesperson Nick Kaiser blames these blockages on a recent fad of adults who habitually use wet wipes. Their being advertised is basically an extra way to freshen yourself up after the bathroom. But despite what it says on the label, wet wipes are not fleshible. Kaiser offers a friendly reminder the safest way to think about what you could put down your toilet is the three peas, pee, paper, and pooh. Next, we're going to talk about portable history, which is you guessed it, portable toilet.

5:00 The technical name for a portable bathroom is a portable toilet. While they're commonly known as porta potties, that's not a generic term, it's a trademark brand name. How they work human waste and toilet paper doesn't get flushed, stays right where it landed in a holding bin. There's an output slot on the outside, to which the sanitation company, the firm that rents out and maintains the portable toilet, attaches a large hose using technologies similar to that of a vacuum cleaner. They suck the mess into a large tank on a truck.

5:30 What a crappy job. That's gotta be pun intended. They refill the holding bin with bacteria and odor fighting chemicals, then drive their truckload to a special sanitary cleaning facility that treats the waste. The largest bank of portable toilets in the United States, nearly five thousand, were ordered to accommodate attendees of President Barack Obama's first inauguration in two thousand and nine. How much does it cost to rent a porta potty? On average seventy five hundred dollars a day, though for longer periods the price comes down significantly to roughly three hundred dollars a month.

6:03 The average portable toilet holds sixty to seventy gallons a waist before it's too full to use. I don't want to see that. Most people really hate using them. A poll by a portable toilet manufacturer found that ninety five percent of women and ninety three percent of men either lay toilet paper over the seat or they do the old hover. The portable toilet's distinctive smell is technically cherry. It's the easiest and cheapest flavor of deodorizer available, so most companies go with that. One. Bubblegum is listed as a distant second, so we're going to call bubblegum the distant cousin of cherry.

6:40 So this is a lot of butts. The average portable toilet lasts for about ten years. They're made of high density polyethylene, which is plastic, which doesn't raw and isn't porous, meaning germs do not stick around. It seems like there's never enough of these at outdoor events. The portable toilet companies have some formulas. They The rule of thumb for outdoor concerts and festivals is one toilet per sixty people. For marathons, it's one toilet for every ten participants. Competitive runners drink a lot of water and they pee a lot more, and they can't stand around waiting.

7:14 The largest bank of portable toilets in the world, about eight thousand, were needed for the religious pilgrims who visited German born Pope Benedict's open air mass and Munich in two thousand and six, eight thousand. That's a lot. To end this podcast, we have to end with a fart joke because it's bathroom humor, right. Why is it against the rules to fart at Apple headquarters because they don't have windows. This has been another episode of strange history. If you like this, please subscribe, like rate, review all the things.

7:47 This episode is produced by Dead to Me Productions. Have a wonderful day, Compton Constant count The countr