JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Dejecta. Noun. Latinate and Victorian term for poop, crap, excrement.

From The Phantom of Liberty by Luis Buñuel

The three books about human waste under review here operate at the intersection of embodiment, technology, sensibilities and permissible speech. The matter of two of them…is “sanitation,” itself a euphemism for excrement, or, depending on the venue, feces, dejecta (a wonderfully Latinate and Victorian term), pooh or poop, crap or, finally, shit. The latter vulgarity is increasingly the term of choice among developing-world sanitation professionals, so that we can be sure what we’re talking about. Occasionally this “sanitation” also includes urine or household grey water, but the real problem is the third of a pound of microbe-rich merde that each of the almost seven billion human bodies eliminates daily.

Both books attack a conspiracy of silence, an “if we do not speak about it, maybe it will not exist” approach…That attitude reinforces ignorance, prevents effective technical response, and kills. The international public health and development literature takes insufficient interest in excrement. And even nosy anthropologists often overlook the answering of the calls of nature.

Christopher Hamlin reviews three books on human waste, sanitation, and culture in American Scientist.

Taken by Butch on the Tarlac-Nueva Ecija border while avoiding the lemmings on MacArthur highway.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie

Everyone gets dressed
And goes out to dinner, but
No one gets to eat.

The Exterminating Angel

Everyone gets dressed
And goes to the party, but
No one gets to leave.

Uro de la Cruz’s still photos of Misteryo Sa Tuwa.

Photo by Federica Palmarin for Vice.

Besides being Europe’s only absolute monarch, the highest authority of the Catholic Church, and the head of state of the smallest country in the world, the Pope is one of few human beings who can claim to be officially infallible. It must be pretty great. In truth, it’s a sort of Catch-22 because the dogma of papal infallibility was decreed by the Catholic Church, which the Pope obviously leads, but anyway: the Pope is preserved from even the possibility of error. Therefore, he must be the best dressed man in the entire planet. He can’t make mistakes!

From Vice: Holy Fashion, A Special Survey on Clerical Tailoring in Vatican City by Lorenzo Gigotti.

From the NYT: As the national economic crisis has deepened and social services have become casualties of budget cuts, libraries (in the US) have come to fill a void for more people, particularly job-seekers and those who have fallen on hard times. Libraries across the country are seeing double-digit increases in patronage, often from 10 percent to 30 percent, over previous years.

But in some cities, this new popularity — some would call it overtaxing — is pushing libraries in directions not seen before, with librarians dealing with stresses that go far beyond overdue fines and misshelved books. Many say they feel ill-equipped for the newfound demands of the job, the result of working with anxious and often depressed patrons who say they have nowhere else to go.

And they have public libraries to go to. We used to have a few, but they’ve all closed. Thomas Jefferson Cultural Center on Buendia—shut. Moved to US Embassy, no literature section. British Council—downsized. Just business books now. Goethe House, the German Cultural Center—moved, shrunk. There’s still Alliance Francaise and Instituto Cervantes—if you read French or Spanish. Lopez Museum library, Filipinas Heritage library—you pay an admission fee. School libraries are not open to the general public or I’d still be hanging out at the UP Main Library.

Pets Make Us Human: The story of Kap, as told by Lora.

It was a couple of days after Christmas. The caretaker of a small property my father owned knocked on our door carrying a small, stinky animal in his hands. It was a pup, abandoned by his mother or their human. From the looks of it he was probably left to die there. He was skinny, his bones were sticking out and he could barely open his eyes. My parents didn’t want to take him in but it was too late: I had fallen in love.

Kap passed away in 2006. He left almost as quietly as he arrived. I took care of several dogs after he passed, and one of them looks eerily like him. That dog is still with me now, a constant reminder of my canine friend.