Everything fascinates me, and when I mean everything I mean even things that are down right bizarre.
We are trapped in bodies we did not choose, that were given to us for free to experience life, and that we can control with our mind like puppet masters. I want to move my left arm, guess what, it moves! it is awesome!
This wonder of nature we call body can do so many amazing things, sing, cook, drive, program, build bridges, destroy the environment, etc.
But let’s get to the point. As beautiful as we may think we are, we all have to crap, poop, do the number two, however you may want to call that relieving bodily function. Every single human being, from the day is born is faced almost every single day of their existence with the urge to expel shit out of their bum holes.
Think about this, the average person lives 75 years or about 27,000 days. This means that all healthy humans will take about 27,000 dumps during their life span.
This amount to tremendous pile of shit! The average human dump weighs close to 1 pound, which amounts to about 27,000 pounds of crap in a life time!
This adds to over 10 tons of “mierda”, kaka, feces, brown fudge!
Here is a tip. When you feel overwhelmed by the beauty, power, or fame of a celebrity, politician, or even your boss, picture them taking a dump, suddenly they will become so much more human, so approachable, so much more like us mortal beings.
Let’s face it, even Barack Obama has to visit the presidential “throne” every single day, he better for the good of his country! and yes, that smashingly gorgeous fine Victoria’s Secret model, she also has to squeeze hard her perfect God given butt cheeks and cringe her flawless angelical face to liberate herself of all the brown impurities her magazine cover body insists on producing.
Bottom line, we are all humans, Bono, The Pope, Katty Perry, Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, you, me, every single one of us has to crap. Why be ashamed of being who we are, let’s embrace our crappy bodies. Let’s welcome the little warning farts alerting us of the imminent and inevitable next date with the toilet.
For some reason, despite being so evolved in technology, human rights and freedoms, we still have a very unique relationship with every day things such as sex, money, and yes, our own crap.
I am not suggesting here to go and crap everywhere as a sign of self acceptance. Please don’t go as far as Robert Downey Jr taking a dump over one of your coworker’s desk. (Apparently he was not very happy how he was treated on the set of Weird Science back in 1985).
Now that we are more comfortable speaking about shit, let me move on to the real subject of this article.
The art of wiping your ass. Going back to the numbers, I assume almost everyone wipes their ass after defecating.
This means that you, or someone else, will wipe your ass about 27,000 times during your life.
One would think that such a familiar act, performed about 6 billion times a day or 70,000 times per second, would have called a long time ago for the creation of an internationally accepted procedure.
We have created procedures and rules for everything. There are norms that we can follow to properly eat, talk, drive, negotiate, pay taxes, even tie our shoes. But we have no standardized procedure to do something that is happening 70,000 times per second on this earth!
No one is taught at home or school how to properly wipe their ass and yet it is such a important part of our lives.
Growing up I had little embarrassing conversations with my friends trying to figure out the right way to do it.
The closest I got to a procedure was either to crunch it in a ball or fold it.
So to this day all I know is that the world is divided into either “crunchers” or “folders”, what are you?
I proudly admit I am folder. This is a question of neatness, the same way I like to fold my underwear and not crunch it and throw it like a basketball into my drawer.
I think it is time that we settle this issue once and for all. Future generations will thank me for lifting this weight off their conscience.
I am a total “folder” advocate and here is why.
Common toilet paper is conveniently micro-perforated about every 4 inches. This makes it very easy to rip neat squares of tissue.
The minimum number of squares needed produce a consistent crunch or fold is 3. That is exactly a foot of tissue paper.
The average human dump requires about 3 precise such pieces, amounting to 9 squares or 3 feet of paper.
I am willing to bet, the crunchers of this world need more than 3 1ft pieces and here is why.
A folder can comfortably fold the one foot piece of tissue twice to get two comfortable ass wipes.
A cruncher can only really use a crunch of tissue paper once.
You see, a folders’s second fold covers the scooped shit from the first fold.
If the shit is not too liquid, his or her hands will be poop free thanks to this strategical second fold.
Once a crunch is used, the cruncher is left to deal with a rough sphere in which one of its hemi-speheres is covered with shit.
We all know, that to comfortable grab a sphere, our hands must cover more than half of the sphere and there, my friends, lies the problem. Crunchers due to their laziness are forced to dispose of their shitty crunch after just one wipe.
Spare your shitty comments as this is truly shitty logic. And this logic tells me that crunchers must indeed use twice as much toilet paper as their more environmentally friendly counterparts, the folders.
So who cares If you crunch your toilet paper to wipe your ass? the world does, the trees do.
When 70,000 people are wiping their ass every second, that amounts to a shit load of paper.
Here is how much paper. Assuming the world is split equally into crunchers and folders being very conservative we would get that every single person in this world consumes about 5 feet of toilet paper daily (not counting toilet paper used when peeing, or the differences between men and women).
That is 350,000 feet per second of paper wiping our collective bums worldwide.
To meet this demand, the world has to produce 66 miles of tissue per second at a rate 238 thousand miles of paper per hour.
That is toilet paper flowing out of factories at over 300 times the speed of sound!
The earth is 25 thousand miles in circumference, so every hour we could wrap the entire earth with toilet paper 9 times over! Holy cow!
The average toilet paper roll is about 340 feet long which means to wipe the world’s ass takes 1000 rolls per second, or close to 4 million roles per hour[1]. That is a big poopy bum if you ask me!
So how many trees does it takes to wipe the world’s bum?
The average toilet paper roll weighs 227 grams and the average tree can produce 45 kgs of toilet paper[2].
This means one tree can produce about 200 rolls. If we are consuming 1000 rolls per second that means we are killing 5 trees per second. We are wiping our asses with at a rate of 300 trees a minute, 18,000 trees an hour, 432,000 a day, 157 million trees a year!!!
We are literally wiping our asses with entire forests every month. What a sad ending for millions of beautiful trees.
Here is Baby tree talking to mama tree:
Baby tree: mommy when I grow up I want to be happy and make many friends with birds, plants, squirrels, monkeys and flying foxes.
Mommy tree: forget it my dear, chances is you will be smeared with shit and flushed down a toilet.
Baby Tree: somebody burn me now please!
Back to the evil crunchers. If all the crunchers in this world would switch to the folding wiping ass method we could reduce toilet paper consumption globally by a whopping 25%. We could save about 40 million trees a year!
Do you care about the world Mr Cruncher? if you do, then learn to wipe your ass properly.
I don’t blame you, nobody has ever cared to teach us how to wipe our asses. But no one cared to find out that a proper daily ass wipe can save 40 million trees yearly.
Well, the time to take care of our shit properly has come.
Here is a short video showing you the folding method to wipe your ass and save trees.
Courtesy of Grumo Media.
[VIDEO EXPLAINER COMING UP…]
Say no to the evil crunch method, become a folder and save the world one wipe a time!
Notes:
1. Pretty close estimate. Wikipedia estimates 3.5 million roles per hour or 83 million per day
2. The average sheet of toilet paper weighs in at a little over .22 grams and 4.0625 inches per square reaching approximately 338.5 feet per roll and 5.3 million miles of toilet paper per day. Source “The history of toilet paper” by Patrick A. Tollefsrud.
Some alternatives to toilet paper: Sea shells (really?), leaves, baby wipes, soap and water, hose, bidet, Comfort Wipe (hilarious), any more?
(Para leer la versión en castellano de este articulo Haz Click Aqui.)
Related article: The Art of “Cagar”