Defence officials in Halifax declare war on bird droppings

1 hour, 25 minutes ago

By The Canadian Press

HALIFAX, N.S. - Military officials in Halifax have declared war on bird poop.

The Defence Department says a licensed falconer and his raptor have been hired to "harass" nuisance pigeons and seagulls within the confines of HMC Dockyard.

As well, the contractor could use a starter pistol with blank ammunition as part of the effort to scare the nuisance birds away from the waterfront facility.

Military officials say the move is prompted by recent health and safety concerns involving bird droppings and associated bird food waste.

The bird war is taking place in the vicinity of the naval jetties for a week, beginning Monday, between 7:30 a.m. and 8:30 a.m.

A Toilet Paper Cutter Designed to Allow Sheets to be Torn Off with One Hand

Are you conscious of the need to use both hands when tearing off toilet paper?

As a company dedicated to developing people-friendly welfare equipment, Yoshino Kinzoku, as the result of an eager research campaign, has succeeded in perfecting a long-awaited cutter that makes it easy to tear off sheets of paper from a roll of toilet tissue using one hand.

Called Kiriko, this product is totally new type of paper cutter that makes use of toilet paper's characteristic of being easily dissolved in water. Designed so that the end of the paper always sticks out from the holder, making it easier to remove, the device can be used with all types of toilet paper on the market.

With this paper cutter, by supplying only a small amount of water the paper is cut easily without requiring power. Moreover, he cut ends are tidier than in the case of conventional holders that employ a blade or a saw-like cutter.

Kiriko is ideal for people with hand disabilities as well as being suitable for everyone else from infants to senior citizens. Please check out for yourself the extra convenience of being able to tear off toilet paper with just one hand.

Edward Weston

Pub row erupts after feces found in ice cream

Wed Oct 29, 9:02 AM

SYDNEY (Reuters) - A bitter row has broken out between one of Sydney's largest tourist pubs and a family of five who accused chefs of serving human excrement in their gelato after they complained about noise during a football match.

State government food minister Ian Macdonald confirmed on Wednesday that frozen fecal matter had been found in a serving of chocolate gelato offered to placate pub patron Steve Whyte and his wife Jessica, who became "violently ill" after eating it.

"The stench went through my nostrils, I retched and spat it into the napkin," Jessica Whyte told the Daily Telegraph newspaper, recounting what local media are calling "gelati-gate."

The tainted sweet was allegedly served up at the Coogee Bay Hotel, one of Sydney's largest and most popular beachfront hotels, located just a few minutes south of Bondi Beach.

The pub has denied serving excrement to the Whyte's after they complained they were unable to hear a televised football game due to loud music, with both the chef and restaurant manager volunteering for DNA tests to prove their innocence.

Both sides have accused the other of money seeking, with the Whyte's claiming they were offered A$5,000 ($3,240) in hush money by pub General Manager Tony Williams, while they in turn were accused of trying to negotiate up to A$1 million in damages.

The argument over accusations of "kitchen revenge" has shocked Australians, leading into an expected searing, gelato-friendly summer, capturing national headlines for days.

Macdonald said DNA analysis would now be done to determine if the sample was of human or animal origin as police and food authorities investigate the case.

"Obviously, we are keeping an open mind and do not want to pre-empt this investigation in any manner," he said.

The eastern Sydney hotel is standing by staff and on Tuesday said its own lab tests on the chocolate gelato tub had found no evidence of contamination.

($1=A$1.54)

Serrano’s work focuses on universal themes such as bodily fluids, religion, sex and death. In this new series he continues his investigation of bodily functions through brightly colored photographs of excrement produced by a motley of animals. The photographs are formally constructed and demonstrate Serrano’s considerable technical skill while analyzing subject matter that might make some viewers squeamish. The artist treats the feces to his familiar bright psychedelic backgrounds and titles that demonstrate his keen sense of humour.

Accused of passing gas, man charged with battery

Wed Sep 24, 10:16 PM

By The Associated Press

SOUTH CHARLESTON, W.Va. - A West Virginia man who police said passed gas and fanned it toward a patrolman has been charged with battery on a police officer.

Jose A. Cruz, 34, of Clarksburg, was pulled over early Tuesday for driving without headlights, police said. According to the criminal complaint, Cruz smelled of alcohol, had slurred speech and failed three field sobriety tests before he was handcuffed and taken to a police station for a breathalyzer test.

As Patrolman T.E. Parsons prepared the machine, Cruz scooted his chair toward Parsons, lifted his leg and "passed gas loudly," the complaint said.

Cruz, according to complaint, then fanned the gas toward the officer.

"The gas was very odorous and created contact of an insulting or provoking nature with Patrolman Parsons," the complaint alleged.

He was also charged with driving under the influence, driving without headlights and two counts of obstruction.

Cruz acknowledged passing gas, but said he didn't move his chair toward the officer nor aim gas at the patrolman. He said he had an upset stomach at the time, but police denied his request to go to the bathroom when he first arrived at the station.

"I couldn't hold it no more," he said.

He also denied being drunk and uncooperative as the police complaint alleged. He added he was upset at being prepared for a breathalyzer test while having an asthma attack. The police statement said he later resisted being secured for a trip to a hospital that he requested for asthma treatment.

Cruz said the officers thought the gas incident was funny when it happened and laughed about it with him.

"This is ridiculous," he said. "I could be facing time."

Canadian Tories scrap picture of pooping puffin

1 hour, 45 minutes ago

OTTAWA (Reuters) - Canada's ruling Conservative Party have removed an image of a puffin dropping bird-poo on the shoulder of Liberal leader Stephane Dion after complaints that it was a bit too much of a dirty trick.

A Conservatives' Web sites, http://notaleader.ca, showed an animated puffin flying across the screen and plopping a white blob on the shoulder of Dion.

"It was in poor taste, and was removed as soon as it came to the attention of senior campaign officials," said Harper spokesman Kory Teneycke. The image was up for less than 10 hours. Another official said Harper never saw the website.

In the new web site, the puffin still flies behind Dion, who the Conservatives portray as weak and out of touch, but it has cleaned up its act.

(Reporting by Randall Palmer; editing by Janet Guttsman)

Le Nouveau Merdiana ou Manuel scatologique par une société de gens sans gêne. A Paris et en tous lieux [Baillieu], 1870.

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'Social injustice is killing people on a grand scale': report

Thu Aug 28, 1:06 AM

People are dying early not only because of health gaps between rich and poor countries but also because of a lack of housing and clean water in wealthy countries like Canada, policy-makers said in a report to the World Health Organization on Thursday.

The 256-page report, Closing the gap in a generation: health equity through action on the social determinants of health, shows how the conditions in which people live and work directly affects the quality of their health.

The "toxic combination of bad policies, economics, and politics is, in large measure, responsible for the fact that a majority of people in the world do not enjoy the good health that is biologically possible," the report's authors wrote.

"Social injustice is killing people on a grand scale."

The report defines social determinants of health are the circumstances in which people are born, grow up, live, work and age, and the systems put in place to deal with illness.

In Canada, nearly 1.5 million people, mostly single mothers and children, lack decent family income, safe and affordable housing, suffer food insecurity and are vulnerable to violence, said the group's Canadian commissioner, Monique Bégin, a former federal health minister and a professor in the school of management at the University of Ottawa.

Canadians may be proud that the United Nations voted the country "the best country in the world in which to live" for seven years in a row, but not everyone shares equally in that high quality of life, Bégin said.

"This report is a wake-up call for action towards truly living up to our reputation."

Food banks in Canadian cities, unacceptable housing, high suicide rates among young Inuit, and the uprooting of Kashechewan Cree community from the James Bay region in 2005 and 2008 because of unsafe water and flooding are examples of areas for improvements, Bégin said.

Health inequities are reflected in the differences in life expectancies between countries, and within countries, the report said.

A child born in Japan or Sweden can expect to live to 80 years, but less than 50 years in several African countries.

Within a rich country like the United Kingdom, the life expectancy at birth for men in the Calton neighbourhood of Glasgow is 54 years, 28 years less than that of men in Lenzie, a few kilometres away, the report said.

The commission's three recommendations to close the gap in a generation are:

- Improve daily living conditions, such as nourishing mothers and expanding education to early child development.

- Tackle the inequitable distribution of power, money and resources, for example between men and women.

- Measure and understand the problem of health inequity and evaluate the impact of changes.

Canada, Brazil, Chile, Iran, Kenya, Mozambique, Sri Lanka, Sweden, and the U.K. have committed to improving social determinants of health equity, and are already developing policies across governments to tackle them, the commission said.

Bégin said examples in Canada include the Healthy Cities project that supports health promotion, Saskatoon's plan of action on poverty and the Calgary Committee to End Homelessness.

Art Garbage

Great resource for toilet signs around the world.

Design students. The Competition is part of the communication project run by Oliviero Toscani, together with La Sterpaia for Sebach, the Used to seeing Sebach cabins in our cities, at concerts, events or building sites, and following the peaceful street invasion of the entertaining series dedicated to artists and the great Masters in the history of art, we have reached The Dream Toilet, an International concept Competition open to Architecture, Engineering and Art andleading chemical toilet rental company.

Participants will put together a project and design proposal that identifies and plans a new profile and image for Sebach portable chemical toilet cabins. The project must offer new ideas for future re-styling of the cabins, and it must communicate the innovation of the Sebach brand as well as take into account the aesthetic, hygiene and comfort needs of the various types of customers.

Link

Bat(h)man

Japan’s Royal Thrones
These high-tech toilets will measure your blood pressure, light your nighttime perambulations, and keep you warm and dry

By Kenji Hall and Hiroko Tashiro

What do you get when you combine Japan’s love of gadgetry with its cleanliness obsession? The highest-tech toilets on the planet. The technology that’s packed into commodes these days will make your head spin. Upscale models feature infrared sensors, microprocessors, and light-emitting diodes. And even many common models have seats that warm your backside, blast it with water, and then blow-dry it.

Japan’s push to build a better toilet began in earnest in the late 1970s. Back then, squat-toilets were as common as the Western-style ones. Manufacturers such as Toto and Inax poured billions into research, experimenting with all sorts of zany ideas. Today, the high-tech variety is fast replacing the push-flush in homes, offices, and even public facilities. One factor driving the switch: water conservation efforts. The new low-flow models use just 20% the water that conventional toilets do.

Manufacturers sell roughly 4 million toilets annually in Japan, and nearly two-thirds of those have advanced features, according to industry stats. Yet despite all the technological advancements, Toto, Inax, and Matsushita Electric Industrial have yet to make much headway with consumers overseas. Still, that hasn’t discouraged them from flooding the market with new models every few months. And given the miniaturization of chips and the advances of robotics, these bionic toilets may one day find their way into homes worldwide. Here’s a look at a few of the models now available in Japan.

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Antonie Van Leeuwenhoek's simplistic single-lens microscope from the ~1670s in which two screws allowed the distance from the lens and the up-and-down movement of the specimen to be adjusted.

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From AFP:

"GENEVA (AFP) — A giant inflatable dog turd by American artist Paul McCarthy blew away from an exhibition in the garden of a Swiss museum, bringing down a power line and breaking a greenhouse window before it landed again, the museum said Monday.

The art work, titled "Complex Shit", is the size of a house. The wind carried it 200 metres (yards) from the Paul Klee Centre in Berne before it fell back to Earth in the grounds of a children's home, said museum director Juri Steiner.

The inflatable turd broke the window at the children's home when it blew away on the night of July 31, Steiner said. The art work has a safety system which normally makes it deflate when there is a storm, but this did not work when it blew away.

Steiner said McCarthy had not yet been contacted and the museum was not sure if the piece would be put back on display."

When nature calls at the beachside Mumin Papa Cafe in the city of Akashi (Hyogo prefecture), patrons have the luxury of using an underwater restroom built into the side of a giant aquarium filled with exotic fish and a sea turtle that likes to watch. According to the cafe owner, the 30-million-yen ($270,000) sub-aquatic restroom is designed to recreate the pleasant sensation of relieving yourself while swimming in the ocean. Unfortunately for male patrons, however, the submerged toilet is for women only. When asked about the voyeuristic turtle, the owner admits it is male and a bit of a letch.

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The marketing minds at Fumakilla, a pesticide manufacturer, have launched a gimmicky bug spray promotional campaign that makes use of heat-sensitive, color-changing stickers placed in urinals at public restrooms around Shinjuku station. Under ordinary, dry conditions, the special urinal stickers show a housefly in the crosshairs of a rifle scope, but as men take aim and relieve themselves on the stickers, the fly transforms into an advertising message.

The stickers are printed with a layer of special, heat-sensitive ink developed by Pilot Ink. When the sticker is exposed to a certain amount of heat, this layer of ink becomes transparent, revealing an advertisement printed underneath. Dai Nippon Printing, who manufactured the stickers for Fumakilla, designed them to withstand the rigors of being placed in a public urinal for extended periods of time. Fumakilla says that in addition to serving as a form of advertising, the stickers provide men with a convenient target to aim for when using urinals, which leads to a cleaner restroom environment.

The company has also launched a website featuring a simple Flash game called “Ippatsu Meichu,” which allows players to test their fly-shooting skills in a virtual lavatory. Make sure not to make a mess, though, or you’ll get a visit from the angry toilet lady.

On November 21, a group of small- to medium-sized venture companies based in western Japan unveiled an autonomous ladybug-shaped robot designed to clean public restrooms at highway rest areas.

The 1-meter (39-inch) tall, 1.35-meter (53-inch) long prototype robot — named “Lady Bird” — is equipped with water tanks, brushes and other tools needed for heavy-duty scrubbing. Obstacle detection sensors allow the robot to safely perform its duties without running into people.

In addition to cleaning, Lady Bird can engage in simple conversation with restroom users, thanks to microphones in its “antennae,” speech recognition capabilities and a voice synthesizer. The robot has access to the latest information about traffic conditions on nearby roads, which it can relay to anyone comfortable enough to ask.

The developers, who are building Lady Bird for West Nippon Expressway Company Limited (NEXCO), aim to complete the machine by March 2009, and they hope to one day see it cleaning toilets at hotels and other institutions. Lady Bird robots are expected to sell for about 3.5 million yen ($30,000) each.

When he was a child, Takashi Murakami's mother used to tell him: "Takashi, you are very lucky. If Kokura had not been cloudy, you wouldn't be here today." On August 9, 1945, she'd been a kid herself, living in the city that the U.S. had targeted for its second atomic-bomb attack on Japan. Because of bad weather, she and thousands of others were spared, and Nagasaki, with a small patch of blue in its overcast skies, was incinerated instead.

Fate doesn't get much more capricious than that. Perhaps Murakami, a globe-trotting artist, curator, and theorist, feels he's been living on borrowed time since before he was born, in 1962. This might explain his varied (at times, frenzied) output of paintings, sculptures, animation, and luxury goods, all on view in this Brooklyn Museum retrospective.

Few skies are bluer than the one in 2002's Kawaii! Vacances d'été, a 30-foot-wide canvas (in six panels) arrayed with colorful flowers, some of their perfectly straight stalks towering over the viewer, nearly every one sporting a gaping smile. Kawaii means "cute" in Japanese, and this parade of immaculately painted cartoons is just that; yet, like a famous series of flowers that preceded them, they also signal something darker. In 1964, shortly after Lyndon Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater in the presidential election, Andy Warhol exhibited his flower paintings—broad, high-contrast petals in bright hues on grainy black backgrounds. He said at the time that if Goldwater had won, he would have exhibited pictures of the conservative senator from Arizona, because "then everything would go, art would go." This seems a reference to Johnson's famous "Daisy" attack ad, in which a girl plucks flower petals before looking up to behold a mushroom cloud—after which Americans decided in landslide proportions that Goldwater couldn't be trusted with the nuclear button.

In many ways, Andy is the template that Murakami has followed: Just as the godfather of pop wallpapered gallery walls with cows and Maos, Murakami has filled entire rooms with his signature "Jellyfish" eyes—big, round, and long-lashed—and patterns of ghostly, wavering skulls that coalesce into ersatz camouflage. (He has a way to go to best Warhol's deeply strange and absurd movies; Murakami's videos are fun and well-wrought, but even with their South Park levels of scatology, they lack real vigor and revelation.)

Murakami's smiling flowers are everywhere, notably in a large fiberglass-and-iron sculpture that recalls Harold Edgerton's microsecond exposures of atomic blasts, which capture expanding waves of light and heat frozen into mottled spheres of horrific beauty. The exuberant blossoms of Murakami's Flower Matango (b) (2001–6) form a chromatic crust over a huge ball sprouting green tendrils and outrigger blooms, as if their sunny energy could not be contained. Mushrooms and their cloud brethren also colonize much of Murakami's work. Ten feet high and more than 34 feet across, the 1999 painting Super Nova riffs on Oasis's "Champagne Supernova" (sample lyric: "Where were you while we were getting high?"), altered states (the colorful fungi army stares out at the viewer through multiple sets of eyes), and funhouse-mirror-like shifts in scale (one can almost hear a Warner Brothers–style "Boooooinnnngg!" emanating from the spreading caps of the biggest 'shrooms). Even stranger are the skull-shaped mushroom clouds that Murakami cribbed from a popular Japanese cartoon, where each episode ends with the villain being atomized by a nuclear explosion, only to return the following week hale and hearty.

Japan's postwar obsession with all things cute (a retreat from worldly dangers?) both attracts and repulses Murakami. In the huge painting Tan Tan Bo Puking–a.k.a. Gero Tan (2002), he places a phalanx of his idiotically grinning flora in front of another of his cartoon creatures, DOB, a Mickey Mouse parody that first appeared in the early '90s, here grown to Godzilla-like proportions, with toxic effluvia and fecal torrents streaming from between shard-like teeth. Trust me: Murakami's immaculate "Superflat" surfaces do not read as posters or graphics. The garish dollops and swirls of contrasting color may recall the psychedelic tumescence of last year's "Summer of Love" extravaganza, but unlike that era's belief in a new, youthful movement, this work views innocence through fatalistic (if saucer-shaped) eyes, exuding a compelling world-weariness not only for this realm but for those of sci-fi and fantasy as well. The forms are often as gelatinous and crumpled as a human brain; indeed, they can feel like a personification of otaku culture, roughly translated as those obsessed with manga and anime tales. But unlike Lichtenstein's bald comic-panel rip-offs, Murakami evinces an abiding respect for his source materials (Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, Disney cartoons, the apocalyptic anime Akira, and myriad other pop-cult touchstones).

Having sold miniature versions of his sculptures as "snack toys," Murakami has bested even Warhol in the ancillary-merch sweepstakes—which brings us to the Louis Vuitton shop, installed as part of the show, blunt as a torpedo amidships. After taking in the chromatic amplitude and rarefied surfaces of the sculptures and paintings, the "Jellyfish Eye"–patterned bags and white-clad salesfolk feel beside the point, but these ostentatious items may actually be the heart of the show. As Scott Rothkopf's fascinating catalog essay points out, Murakami's career is a veritable case study of art-world conflicts of interest, because "his activities as a curator and critic function as a shrewd marketing device. By framing and advancing a new 'movement' of sorts, he has gained for his cohorts significant traction in both foreign intellectual and commercial markets." For example, Murakami curated the hugely successful "Little Boy" show at the Japan Society in 2005, presenting himself and the artists he represents through his company, KaiKai Kiki, as exemplars of a new Japanese avant-garde. He then convinced Yale to publish a catalog laden with his own essays. So peddling exclusive accessories becomes just another tentacle in Murakami's evolving marketing organism. Andy must be bowing his head in admiration.

As with Warhol, the best stuff here is surprising, gorgeously executed, and darkly alluring. The 11-foot-square canvas The World of Sphere (2003) features more chirpy flowers and the usual bulbous creatures, one with hula-hoop halos spinning like centrifuges around its pointy head. A miasma of Louis Vuitton logos rises like swamp gas in the background, a smog of luxury.

Takashi Murakami's Smog of Luxury

Mr. Jellyfish Eyes at the Brooklyn Museum

By R.C. Baker

Tuesday, April 15th 2008

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The Women's Room by Cynthia Consentino.

Elegant, sophisticated, rebellious, alternative and eternally fashionable, black has become virtually synonymous with chic and style. But while this colour is often present in avant-garde creative work, no one has ever dared to use it for toilet paper until now. Black in the loo, how chic and sophisticated can you get?

Yamato house industrial corporation in collaboration with TOTO Ltd. corporation will start selling the toilet of the future from April 5th onwards.
Aside from the regular functions, you can also check your health status with 4 parameters:
☞ the glucose level in your urine
☞ the blood pressure
☞ the fat precentage in the body
☞ the weight

Needless to say that all this information can be transferred to your PC.

Apart from LCD TV's and other gizmos Panasonic even makes toilet seats in Japan and here is their latest offering the DL-GWN range of advanced toilet seats. The seat has a sensor and upon detecting presence lights up and illuminiates a bulls eye in the water. The main use of the light is after a night of heavy partying and so those middle night breaks where if you get a smelly toilet if you go haywire. The light also warms the seat and helps in cleaning the seat. In Japan the water used for washing and bathing is recycled for flushing. The water is boiled and used to clean the seat automatically after use.

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Your toilet seat should match your shower curtains, too. Starting in November, for just two months, furniture and interior design company INAX is selling these awesome toilet lids in 11 different colors. Of course, no Japanese toilet seat is marketable without a bidet system installed, so it is fully capable of shooting warm water up your ass. It even has a fully automated toilet seat that automatically shuts after use so you don't have to get yelled at for leaving the seat up. Oh! And also, it has a self-cleaning nozzle. It retails for 156,000 yen, a little under $1,400.

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Toilet shaped cell phones of Japan

Kimberly-Clark Professional Crosses Final Touchless Frontier With Introduction of First Electronic Bath Tissue Dispenser

Advanced Electronics Bring Hygienic, No-Touch Dispensing To Restroom Stall

ROSWELL, Ga. (July 9, 2007) - Kimberly-Clark Professional is about to go where no health and hygiene company has gone before - crossing the final touchless restroom frontier - with the introduction of the first electronic bath tissue dispenser.

While many public restrooms offer hygienic no-touch dispensing for sinks, hand towels and soap, bath tissue has not been included in this trend. Until now — with today's launch of the Kimberly-Clark Professional* JRT* Electronic Coreless bath tissue dispenser.

"The electronic revolution has entered the bathroom stall," said Richard Thorne, director of the washroom business, North America, for Kimberly-Clark Professional. "It's a major leap forward in restroom hygiene because it eliminates the need to touch the dispenser during use."

The new system automatically dispenses a pre-measured amount of toilet paper when users place their hands under the dispenser. The ground-breaking dispenser combines the unique benefits of advanced touchless electronics with high-capacity SCOTT® coreless bathroom tissue (which eliminates the hole and cardboard core in the center of the roll). The result: enhanced restroom hygiene, reduced consumption and hassle-free performance. Another plus is compliance with the Federal Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), when properly installed, because of the system's easy one-handed dispensing.

The JRT* Electronic Coreless bath tissue dispenser offers a variety of other benefits, including:

• A 20 percent reduction in the amount of bath tissue used, through controlled dispensing.

• 45 percent less packaging waste than standard cored Jumbo Roll Bath Tissue.

• A battery life of more than one year.

• Programmable sheet lengths to provide users with more options. These include short (16"), medium (20") and long (24") settings.

• Sensor placements that enable the dispenser to be installed on either side of the stall.

Users can also obtain bath tissue manually, by pushing and turning a knob on the front of the dispenser. In addition, the unit offers a stub roll feature that allows for manual feeding of the tissue. LED lights let maintenance workers know when paper and battery levels are low to reduce the risk of battery or product run out.

The JRT* Electronic Coreless bath tissue dispenser is the latest addition to the Kimberly-Clark Professional family of hygienic product solutions for the washroom. For more information on the JRT* Electronic Coreless bath tissue dispenser, visit http://www.kcprofessional.com.