Sorry for all the potty humor around here lately, and, well, you've probably already heard this, but JD Salinger's toilet is for sale on eBay, advertised as "used" and "not cleaned". You only have eight days left to bid on this item, which has a "buy now" price of one million pounds.
With a price like that, the seller outta consider offering it as buy to let (groan).
To put this in perspective, back in 1999, a signed copy of Duchamp's "Fountain" sold for 1.7 million dollars.
Still unsold, to the best of my knowledge, is a toilet that Hemingway "rescued" from, if memory serves me, the demolition of one of his favorite Key West Bars, and set up as a fountain or birdbath in the courtyard of his Key West home.
Curiously, there's a webpage about the world's most expensive toilets, which includes something in outerspace, but which lists none of these three artist-related commodes.
One last piece of toilet trivia to ponder the next time you're perched upon the throne: Leave it the US to build two-story outhouses.
My next piece is about struggles in Egypt circa 1900, so for those of you bored with the potty stuff: Bear with us!
ReplyDeletethere's more scatology in ole egypt than you can shake a stick at.
ReplyDeleteI think I'd avoid the ground floor of one of them two storey dealies!
ReplyDeleteDung Beetle:
"The scarab was linked to Khepri ("he who has come into being"), the god of the rising sun. The ancients believed that the dung beetle was only male in gender, and reproduced by depositing semen into a dung ball. The supposed self-creation of the beetle resembles that of Khepri, who creates himself out of nothing. Moreover, the dung ball rolled by a dung beetle resembles the sun. Plutarch wrote:
“ The race of beetles has no female, but all the males eject their sperm into a round pellet of material which they roll up by pushing it from the opposite side, just as the sun seems to turn the heavens in the direction opposite to its own course, which is from west to east."[8] ”
The ancient Egyptians believed that Khepri renewed the sun every day before rolling it above the horizon, then carried it through the other world after sunset, only to renew it, again, the next day. Some New Kingdom royal tombs exhibit a threefold image of the sun god, with the beetle as symbol of the morning sun. The astronomical ceiling in the tomb of Ramses VI portrays the nightly "death" and "rebirth" of the sun as being swallowed by Nut, goddess of the sky, and re-emerging from her womb as Khepri."
Nothing sexier, btw, than screwing a dung ball.
ReplyDelete