Science, Technology and the American Advertising Industry Saving the Earth, the Forest and your Butthole, one Sheet of Shit-Paper at a time.
Charmin toilet paper has boldly altered the perforations that separate one “sheet” from the next, changing them from straight-line perforations, an example of which would graphically look like this, into CURVED perforations, resulting in a torn edge that looks like…
Ok, there’s no way I can show that on the keyboard apparently. You know what the letter S looks like? Rotate that 90 degrees. And then kinda stretch it out. Kinda like to where it looks like a gentle undulation from one end of the torn sheet to the other. A sort of kind of like the visual depiction of a soft tone of a gentle bell, or ripples in a quiet pond or a rolling kind of hilly road on a country byway on a spring day.
Researching this matter I have learned that this is “smooth-tear technology.” Smooth-tear technology is the result of thousands, or maybe just one, letter of incredible angst and suffering regarding something called the “errant remnant” that occurs (I am guessing one in ten trillion times) enough to where apparently, unlike the eradication of American Culture, people won’t tolerate it any longer.
Apparently when people take the time to write to toilet paper manufacturers, the number one (haha I would call it the number two. But that’s just me)…apparently the number one complaint is the, “useless remnant experience.”
The “useless remnant experience” is apparently so fucking heinous that Charmin, in a gesture of almost saintly selflessness, has created the, “scalloped separation advancement.”
A Google search will reveal that every journalist with a byline at a, “major news entity” has, “reported” on this technological extermination of the “useless remnant experience,” using as validation of the revolutionary aspects of this achievement the official statements from the border-collie-like bright and eager official-statement-makers from Charmin: the corporate chieftains via their ad agency. It’s almost as though these stock-watching high-achievers and everyone in the press, are convinced this renovation of the tear-aspect of their toilet paper is just a shade less earth-shaking than the discovery of an anti-gravity propulsion system. Jesus coming down from the clouds to usher-in the Millennium will not be getting this much journalistic coverage as the Charmin Shitpaper Severance Simplifier is generating.
You see, according to the many many Pulitzer Prize seeking journalists quoting Charmin executives and not claiming to have done any personal research themselves into the matter, the PROBLEM with old fashioned, prehistoric Pleistocene toilet paper like what YOU’RE probably using…the problem is NOT having the shit-sheet come apart in a waveform manner: or in other words in a scollopine undulationary vibrational motif; rather than just a shearing, don’t-give-a-fuck manner….the PROBLEM is that it wastes paper. A small piece falls off. A piece that never gets to touch your dung– And therefor becomes sad.
But this new revolutionary dotted-line technology eliminates that episode of sadness and SAVES PAPER!
You WANT to save paper when you shit. I am sure you know this. When you shit the conservation of the roll is where your attention is when you spin that motherfucker around the center-dowel and those snakelike unravellings come a-speeding off the roll…when you finally decide that the pile of ass-swathing in your mitts is big enough to absorb all the ass-slather that is adhering like a cooling mudflow around your anal canal. You want that tear of the last sheet off the roll to be right on the perforation. And not in some halfway, who knows where, who gives a fuck location on the sheet resulting in the next shitting occupant dropping his drawers, squatting on the bowl, spraying a brown gunnite-like holocaust into the toilet, and then him reaching for the toilet paper in joy and happiness only to find that the FIRST sheet has half of itself missing. You talk about rage and fury and frustration.
Well Charmin has basically obliterated this problem. Your rages and frustrations will have to go and find for themselves some other outlet because the CEO’s and Corporate Directors and Research and Development PhD’s at Charmin Pre-Suppository Prevention Laboratories have scalloped the tear-parameters of your next reach toward the shit-shunter paper on that wobbly bathroom fixture next to you. Yessir, you are looking at calm days ahead. If you think I am just writing fiction like a common journalist, let’s go to Fox News, a place where all its fans are convinced it’s not just another commie, collectivist stronghold.
https://www.fox9.com/news/charmin-revolutionizes-toilet-paper-design-a-game-changer-in-bathroom-comfort
There are dozens of really huge news entities reporting on this, all of them with respectful, dutiful litanies of identical sentences and not a trace of – what I would consider to be essential regarding this “news:” namely – mandatory snark. But there is none.The fact is, as long as the hack gets to see his name attached to a piece of paper or a piece of computer screen in a professional forum. He doesn’t care what he says or what some editor changes what he says into. Not that editors need to monitor their hacks: they all think exactly alike on all political or social or philosophical matters. So, yeah, this is big identical news in a lot of majorly places.
But you, I know, want to get back to the exciting reality of this new shit eraser and I know what you’re asking, “Does the new aspect of the earth-aware tear footprint separating one sheet from the rest affect the actual paper-against-shit accrual aspect at all?” In other words, does the new galloping scalloping cause the toilet paper to gather LESS shit or MORE shit onto itself than does – or did – the old, technology-barren, straightline-torn, now-outdated, toilet paper of long ago? That is, is it better as a shit-accruer? Or is it in fact worse. Or is there no difference? I MUST know!
Well, turns out, THIS is not a question of any particular interest to a “news-gathering” entity because I am GUESSING that gathering-news personnel – already being shit-deep in shit as they already are – why would they have any curiosity about something LESS shit-gathering than they are themselves, namely toilet paper?
Journalists likely – I am guessing – see toilet paper as some sort of inferior, junior varsity level of shit gatherer, not worthy of a lot of scrutiny over and above the official announcements made by the valiant creators of the sections that exist between the sheets that have less sheeting in them when torn.
Sheets for shits – to a professional journalist – is Amateur Hour to a REAL shit-sheet employee, say at The New York Times or Reuters-Rhymes-With-Goiters or Bloomberg or The Washington Post or The Huffington or David Muir Rhymes With Coiffeur. Toilet paper is small potatoes, petulance-wise, to A Major News Source compared to the foul fecal-fumed fundament-like essence of the Major News Source itself.
However I am a journalist of a more noble sort. I do not just accept toilet paper innovations and renovations and ass-salvations just on the words of a CEO most likely written by a copywriter at an ad agency. In fact for all I know the ad agency itself might have actually come up with the idea of perforating the sheets into waveforms rather than straight lines. For the CEO to take the credit is well within the traditional agreements between ad agencies and their clients. In fact ad agencies are EXPECTED to come up with bullshit proclamations, I mean innovative solutions to eternally vexing problems such as this one regarding how best to install separation protocol parameters between sheets of toilet paper.
APPARENTLY the fact that one sheet of toilet paper by itself is absolutely useless for ANYTHING, forget about shearing shit shards off an ass…is never isolated as a topic and set down in the center of a toilet paper manufacturer board meeting as a long-overdue candidate for discussion and debate. One sheet of toilet paper is about as useless as a Kamala Harris translation dictionary: no one on earth knows what she’s saying and no one on earth knows what one sheet of toilet paper could possibly be good for.
You couldn’t wipe the ass of a centipede with one sheet of toilet paper. I know what you’re saying: a centipede has five dozen back legs so it has five dozen crotches which means it has five dozen assholes. This changes nothing in my opinion. In fact, it would make things worse. And let me tell you something pal – you really need to think this shit out before you go on one of these little hoity-toity tears of yours, dragging centipedes into this. Speaking of tears.
Where the fuck was I? Thanks a lot sparky.
Since I am the only journalist in a handful who actually CARES about things, I decided to do some actual asses-on research via the Troll Ops, a Harley, Triumph chopped motorcycle fraternity in Panamint City, referenced here at this website in a previous article. To those of you who insist that Panamint City in Ca. is off limits to casual or serious human habitation as mandated and ordered by one or more Congressionally Approved entities, the Troll Ops are aware of that.
In sort of nearby Ballarat there is a sort of a saloon that is sort of off-limits to State law enforcement for reasons I won’t go into because, frankly, those reasons have nothing to do with toilet paper. Ballarat Ratty, the owner, wasn’t there but his daughter, Vulpina, she was there. Vulpina looks clearly reptilian. But She’s Ballarat Ratty’s daughter and he gets to name her whatever the fuck he wants, I guess.
I asked her if she used Charmin in the restroom. She said “Haha, the restroom? You mean the toilet over there where that guy’s sitting?”
I said “Yeah: there Charmin on that roll?”
She said “Hold on,” and bent into the bar and came back up with a ledger and opened it and flipped a page or two and leaned-in and read something and straightened back up again and looked at me and said “No. Scott-issue.”
I said “You fold a sheet of Scott-issue in fourths and hold it pinched at the corner you can cut glass with it.”
She said, “Are you going to have a fucking drink? Or are you just gonna stand there, drool through your missing teeth, interrogate the House’s inventory policies and tell me what toilet papers can and can’t do.”
I said, “How about I do all of them and you give me two shots of colorless tequila that are a couple of grades higher than Hornitos.”
She said, “We got that. But it’s gonna cost ya.”
I said “Do you know who I am?”
She said, “No. But I know who yer GONNA be: the next in line at the coronor’s you don’t stop fuckin’ with me.”
I said, “Well, look, here’s the deal: I need to have someone test some toilet paper for me cause I’m writing an article for Bikernet.com.”
She said “They still exist?”
I said, “Yeah, look, this is actually important..”
She manifested an eye-to-eye glare that had shortening-someone’s-lifespan written all over it and she said, “You’re writing something for Bikernet…..and it’s important.”
“Yes, that’s correct!” I said with actually a grin of enthusiasm.
She said “In what universe did you come from that you think the words ‘Bikernet’ and ‘important’ can exist in the same sentence.”
We gazed at each other for a long time, her lookin’ at me with hatred and me lookin’ at her with curiosity at whether I could actually take her in a bar fight. It seemed to me even odds. But I said “You’ve broached an issue that has been being discussed and argued for 25 years. We’re not gonna settle this here. It’s too noisy for one thing.
“Listen: Charmin claims it is slicing its shitter sheets a new revolutionary way that is a marvel of American Exceptionalism and that is the rival of the invention of the airplane. I need to have some experiments conducted.”
She kind of leaned back. “Oh! Why didn’t you say so? How can I help?”
I said “You gut any patrons here who need to take a shit?”
She said, raising an index finger and already starting to walk off, ”You stay right there, Sweetie,” and she hustled down to the other end and bent into the bar and came up with a mike and turned to the drink-bottle array and turned off a switch and suddenly the extremely very old school Country music stopped that had a LOT of the men who had been sitting all by themselves, all hangdog and forlorn, suddenly sit upright and look around perplexed.
The barkeep, whose name it actually was, being My Pal Sal, she said into the mike and now facing the quiet patrons said, “Anyone here need to take a crap real bad?”
Couple of hands went up.
She went on: “I gut a guy here says he needs to test a hi-poth-a-noose. Says he claims Charmin has uttered in a new age of shitterosity by cuttin’ the papers off each other different. He needs to test it.”
Someone shouted, “Who cares how its fuckin’ cut off! Long as there’s a-fuckin’ NUFF of it! That’s a DUMB test!”
My Pal Sal said, “What would be a BETTER test of toilet paper, Einstein??”
There was a long silence while the fellow buried his fingers into his whiskers, thinking. Someone yelled out excited, “COLOR????”
A third man turned toward the man who yelled that and said, clearly annoyed and said, “Like, what: brown? Dark brown?”
The other guy thought a minute and then said with some assurance, “Yeah. Brown mebbe.”
The third guy, now clearly exasperated said, “ How would you even know if you GOT any shit on the peper if the paper was already dark brown: touch sections of it with your fingers? When you hit a slick part you’d go ‘Yeah, ok, that part’s shit.’ You really think that’s a good idea?…..’tactile-test toilet paper??”
A fourth guy shouted, “Shape? Maybe round sheets??”
The guy that suggested colored paper said “My shit is usually a kind of runny yellow. With red clumps mixed in. Usually. So I could actually use brown toilet paper. Probly wouldn’t be a problem.”
I had to admire the attitude of some of the patrons. They were clearly trying to cooperate and get into this.
Gesturing to My Pal Sal to hand me the mike I took it and began to amble away from the bar and start explaining the situation.
“I think most of you know who I am and know that I never intrude myself into everyone else’s drinking and relaxation and in some cases morose memories from a life of lost love and lost opportunities courtesy of the in-house melodies and lyrical iterations of depression courtesy of Tex Ritter, Spade Cooley, Doye Odell and Tennessee Ernie.”
“WHO EVEN ARE THESE PEOPLE???!!!”
I looked at the fellow that said that and said, “Legends. Legends, my friend. Legends of travail and hardship and endurance: pioneers in the painting of the American Spirit in song: the spirit of fair-play….kindness to women and children….the gentle balm of drunken oblivion…..and trust in the Lord.” You could have heard a pin drop.
“Oh,” he said finally from out of the silence. “Oh, ok.”
The room now mine to command, I said, “But the reason I’m here is not to amble down the musical road of bad-memories lane where fighting to keep the corn crop from rotting or singing about whether Pappa Clem will die of the rabies and how will we survive if he dies or tuneful inquiries about whether my wife will understand that I love her but ‘Joline At fifteen’ is wearin’ a real thin short dress and no underwear…
“I LOVE THAT SONG!!” someone screamed excitedly.
“But rather I am here to conduct a toilet paper test involving a few volunteers to take a shit over there on the toilet. Does the toilet flush?” I asked loudly, looking around.
“Sometimes,” someone said.
I said, “Sometimes meaning sometimes just today? Or sometimes every few months or so.”
Everyone kind of looked at me, a few people looked at each other and then someone said, “We have lives, you know. We’re not toilet inventorians.”
“This is the only toilet in 20 square miles,” I said annoyed: “You don’t know if it fucking flushes right or not?”
Someone yelled, “Do you see any fucking shit on the floor?”
I looked around and then said, “No, I don’t seem to see any.”
“Then what’s this fucking test and when is it going to fucking start?” The same guy said.
“Ok!” I said excitedly. “Here’s the deal!…Charmin is claiming to have improved their toilet paper.”
Everyone looked up from what they were doing and some left their present locations to quietly move closer and give me their full attention.
I went on, “They’ve altered the separation anomalies of their toilet paper that defines one sheet from another.”
There was an audible but unintelligible murmur among them all, all looking at each other and then silence and looking back at me. “The old tear-footprint was basically the same thing as ‘printing’ and the new one is basically ‘cursive.’ Cursive is like curvy writing like what your parents did.”
“I’VE SEEN THAT!!” someone shouted, standing up and then sitting down. I said, “The CLAIM is that when you tear it…it always tears right across the separation-enabler-perforations. Or, ya know, the tear-place.”
“Toilet paper ALWAYS does that!!” Someone hollered.
I had to admit to myself that this was in fact how it had always seemed to me as well. However this news item had made to the “this just in!” department of every news entity in America. It HAD to be meaningful, was my conclusion.
“I need some people, men, women, I don’t think it matters to use the toilet paper, to take a shit and then use some Charmin. Is there Charmin presently on the roll?”
“No, it’s Scott!” someone shouted.
“God help us,” I said.”Do you keep a rectal-scrapage expert physician on hand during operating hours in that case?” I inquired.
“Yes!!” everyone shouted.
“Divine intervention has brought me here this day,” I announced solemnly. “Our efforts have the approval of On High. This is a holy moment. I have brought some rolls of Charmin: both the old cut and the new cut.”
“WHEN’S THE GODDAMN SHITTING START??????” someone hollered.
“As soon as the rolls are changed,” I assured the fellow.
“Someone take the Scott off and take it outside and put it on a chair in the sand and use it to test the flattening aspects of various steel-jacketed hollow points which is its intended purpose anyway as far as I’m concerned.”
The New And Vastly Improved Charmin having been installed, the first shitter was a fellow named…well maybe his name isn’t necessary. He took what he insisted was a hearty dump and he got up into kind of a bent over squat and we, some of us, took a looksee, and he had a pretty good collection of dung coilage in there and we had him sit back down and get busy with the Charmin.
He spun the roll and got a good ten or twenty feet of toilet paper collected in one hand and then I said, “Ok, tear it off.”
He gave it a good yank and sure enough it was a clear wavy progression of edge both on the section in his hand and the section on the roll.
“Ok, you’re done!” I said.
“What about wiping?” He said.
“Oh, I don’t care about the wiping. Just the tearing of the paper,” I said.
He said “Why is the fucking tearing of the goddamn sheet more important than if the part you actually removed from the roll does or doesn’t clean your fucking ass?”
I said “….What?…..” a bit confused.
He bellowed “WHO THE FUCKING CARES HOW IT MOTHERFUCKING TEARS!”
I went into a slight trance. Almost a reverie. Even though he was still sitting on the toilet, his pants down past his knees, I went forward towards him and bending down, I firmly gripped each shoulder as he looked up at me with an expression I interpreted as him deciding whether or not to extract the Bowie knife from his cascaded trousers and ram it into my abdomen.
I said, quietly and in awe, “You are a genius.”
“I am?” he said, in a sudden reversal of expression from feral to perplexed.
I proclaimed, “That is the entire makings of a rival product’s advertising campaign! ‘Who the fucking cares…. how it motherfucking tears” is how a rival toilet paper company, even Scott, could combat the campaign of Charmin’s ‘we’re saving the earth and your ass too’ toilet paper’ mantra. Even though, if you ask me, it’s actually thinner than the straight-line-cut paper. It’s almost transparent. Seems to me you would need twice as much to get the same amount of shitsmear on the wad once you pulled it around to take a look at it.
“Anyway what you have created sitting here on the hitter, over and above the shit itself, is the slogan ‘who the fucking cares how it motherfucking tears.’ In fact the only thing missing from ‘Who the fucking cares….how it motherfucking tears’ are the words Burma Shave.”
“You wanna take your hands off my shoulders?” the guy said, kind of like in an ultimatum tone.
“Oh! Sure!” I said, backing away. “Sorry! I went kind of into a trance.”
“You really think I’m a genius?“ the guy said, now actually wiping his ass.
“I do indeed, my friend. I do indeed.”
“You gonna steal my slogan?” He inquired blandly, flushing and then unravelling another handload of wavy-cut toilet paper and readministering about a balled-up pound of it down and around his cheek and up into his ass.
“Well I’m sure somebody is, sooner or later.” I said.
“Pisser,” the guy said, flushing and hauling another truckload of paper off the roll.
“Is it still tearing cleanly?” I asked, remembering why I was there in the first place.”
“Fuck if I know,” the guy said, going under and up once again. “And like I say: who the fuck cares.”
I said, “Well….the Charmin CEO apparently cares. And the World Press, apparently cares. Oh, and remember, ‘who the fucking cares how it motherfucking tears’ is a pretty good idea for a rival shitpaper-outfit commercial. You’re quite the Madison Avenue Grey Flannel Suit dude.”
The fellow said, “Well who the fuck DOES care how it tears.” I looked at him pathetically since I now realized the beauty of a properly torn Charmin shit-magnet. “The Earth cares, my friend. The Earth cares.”
The fellow blurted, “The earth cares how I wipe my ass! Is that what you’re saying?”
“Her name is Gaia,” I said benevolently, suddenly filled with CEO wisdom. He looked at the new large wad of about fifty sheets of toilet paper in his mitt, one of the sheets torn cleanly in a sine-wave undulation and said, ”At least I don’t have a leftover shard of paper as a result of an errant bisection of the roll,” saying this with some obvious sincerity. “And that alone is gonna save me a ton of money,” he added redirecting the giant wad to underneath his ass and starting the shit-removal process. “Gonna need another two or three yards o’ this paper ‘fore I’m done with THIS job,” he said. “Chili, sauerkraut, cabbage, plum pie and Bud Lite: gonna have a lotta surprises comin’ out my butthole THIS day,” he added.
“You drink enough Bud Lite you’re butthole’s gonna have a lotta surprises goin’ the OTHER direction too,” I said reassuringly, heading back toward the bar.
“Don’t need THAT HAHAHAHA!!” he yelled as I moved off.
Someone came up to me excitedly and practically stammered, “What if the roll of toilet paper had the curvy serrations going up the middle of the roll instead from side to side??”
I actually thought about this for a very long time. At last and finally I said, “Well, I’m thinkin’ it’s pretty obvious, and I could be wrong, but you would only have two sheets per roll in that case. Two real long ones. PLUS you take two dumps?…. in two days you’d need another roll.”
He said, “Wouldn’t the CEO of Charmin, though, see that as a good idea? Based on their sudden track record of what they see as good ideas? Which is: seeing really stupid ideas as good ideas. I mean, they’re going to outstrip Disney if they keep this up.”
I was on the phone to Proctor&Gamble in two seconds. The Use Just Twice roll was about to be born–J.J. Solari
Epilogue: Not since the revolutionary Charmin ad campaign of “Enjoy the Go” with a proud male bear showing his backside to the other family members, rendering them hysterical with happiness has an ass-maintenance innovation generated so much enthusiasm as the scalloping of the separation perforations of Charmin toilet paper.
Naturally the insistent question is “How is this accomplished?” That’s why next time we will go the remote section of the already-remote Mojave Desert where the machine that creates the cut is located on a one square mile array of industrial technological super-science. A machine left open and exposed to the elements and made out of “malleable titanium,” the Defeater Of The Errant Remnant, as it has been nicknamed, resides open and defiant of the elements, and impervious to spies, malware, and sabotage, it hums and glistens 24 hours a day creating the New Anus-Sourced Happiness For All, where “enjoying the go” is being grandly transformed into “Your Ass Is Now A God” status.
endo
