It’s Valentine’s Day, which means we’re a little low on staffers tonight - while some of us call Spec our significant other, many Speccies are actually out on dates - but we’re hoping the Weekend section (a perennial late-nighter) will match The Eye, which PDF’ed at 3:30 a.m., a record for the year (possibly longer). Of course, the late breaking story on, well, Barnard pipes breaking, kept us in the office for a few more hours. But last night the News team came together in excellent fashion, as the editors coordinated with Photo and a number of reporters on the scene (read: knee-deep in sewage/murky water).

On a more sober note, reports are streaming in of a gunman opening fire on an Illinois campus today. It’s sad, perplexing news. We here at the Spec have to figure out whether - and if so, how - to cover the tragedy. The precedent is technically set by the Virginia Tech incident of last year. What we’ll do now is ask ourselves if this compares, if there’s a local angle, and if we have the logistical support to cover it. While we’re all shocked by the news, this might be one for our readers to follow in the Times and Illinois papers, CNN, or Google News.

The Eye got an awesome e-mail this week; I wanted to share it, but not badly enough to print it. (I hate talking about poop–this seriously qualifies as a “thing” with me—and I didn’t want the subject to grace our pages two weeks in a row.)

Here’s a link to the original article.

The e-mail is pasted below.

Dear Mr. Raphael Pope-Sussman,

I will have you know that the fist person who, having closed a toilet seat, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society. I should say immediately that I, too, used to have my own toilet. Twas indeed a throne, and I confess I know the “corpulent and pasty thighs” of those strangers of whom you speak. They haunted me for a time, but then I became a Communist. Now I share my toilet openly with all - and I highly recommend you yourself take a spin on it. (Get in touch, but wait until you’re sure it’s gonna be a good one.) You will not fail to be impressed with what Wien has to offer, except in one very important category that I sure you’re familiar with.

My complaints reside not with your pseudo-Lockean drivel, of course, but with the insensitivity I perceived in your diatribe to my own anal sensitivity. You’re right: You are no rocket scientist. And just four people shouldn’t go through an entire roll of toilet paper every day. It is this very intelligent declaration that concerns me, but not as a jumping-ground for suspicion of some hygienic intruder like perhaps my socialist self, as you intended it to be. Instead, I see your reflection as a noble and furious testimony of the greatest challenge facing Columbia University and every institutional bathroom in the Universe:

bad

toilet

paper.

Allow me to explain. The toilet paper at this revoltingly rich, elite University has the texture of fucking sandpaper. Besides providing my guests and myself with that acute sensation one might imagine a diamond feels at the polisher’s, the stuff they call toilet paper here doesn’t even work. The highly inefficient process of using more to wipe more only compounds the problem of anal pore suffering. On a good day, with a nice solid turd, I can cap off at three wipes. Most days aren’t good days. I hope this helps you to understand the dearth of toilet paper situation you mention, which I suggest we rename “the excess of coated-abrasives situation.” To repeat, you have no toilet precisely because it doesn’t work.

So we have a problem to solve. Often when people have problems to solve, they ask, “What next?” I have often considered we go on a poop strike. I can hear it now replaying endlessly on Fox News: “DEAN COLUMBO, HELP MY BUM YO!” We will most certainly invite Bollinger and his wife to come shit on the port-A-potties we could set up on Low Steps. When it’s time to wipe, you know what they’re getting.

Or, I could just save us all the fun and buy my own toilet paper. I hope I have found in you a sympathetic reader.

Yours truly,

Christopher Brian Duncan