The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
News of the Tautological
“Toothless Pa. Bank Robber Suspect Needed Dentures”–headline, Associated Press, Feb. 1
From the Statehouse to the Outhouse
“Gov. Rick Snyder got a big laugh in his Jan. 18 State of the State address when he ridiculed red tape by pointing to a state rule that says outhouse users must leave the seat down,” the Detroit Free Press reports from Lansing:
Snyder joked that he doesn’t need the state telling him to put the seat down.
“I don’t know about you, but I have a higher authority at home,” he said in a reference to his wife, Sue Snyder.
When the man in the statehouse doesn’t lower the seat in the outhouse, he ends up in the doghouse. Doesn’t that completely disprove the feminist notion that we live in a male-dominated society? No one ever points out that it’s rude for women to leave the seat down.
Anyway, it turns out Snyder wasn’t quite right. There is no regulation requiring that outhouse seats be left down. But “Department of Environmental Quality rules require that outhouse openings be covered when not in use,” the paper explains.
The reason for this regulation is gross but compelling:
An expert on outhouses said there are important public health reasons for requiring outhouse openings to be covered when not in use. Going back to the 1930s, experts have called for “airtight seat lids.”
One concern is spiders, rats and other critters crawling inside the opening and posing a threat to vulnerable users, said Ronald Barlow, who lives near San Diego, and published the book “The Vanishing American Outhouse” in 1989.
But the bigger fear is if the opening isn’t covered, flies go into the outhouse pit and later land on the dinner table, where they spread germs, Barlow said.
The regulation “prevents typhoid and all kinds of diseases,” Barlow said.
Here in New York, we have a different solution to this problem, one we encourage the good people of the Wolverine State to look into. We call it “indoor plumbing.”
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