With the city council pursuing budget cuts and money tight all around, surely it won't be long until New Albany's sewer system returns to its rightful daily place on the front page. Meanwhile, a new book that is destined to become the ideal Christmas gift for members of New Albany's "Potty Police" is reviewed in this week's issue of The Economist.
Adventures in human waste: Lifting the lid, from the Oct. 9, 2008 edition of The Economist.
DEATH, once referred to in euphemisms, if at all, has been reborn as prime-time television drama. Sex and money are now topics for documentaries, even after-dinner conversation. The last taboo, surely, is shit. The byproducts of digestion are so hard to mention—adolescent jokes aside—that symptoms of bowel cancer are often ignored until it is too late.
But as Rose George explains in this fascinating and eloquent book, there is a great deal that needs to be said about excretion that is not remotely funny. Two-fifths of the world’s population has nowhere to defecate except open ground ...
You might want to check out this transcript of an interview with the author, Rose George, in Salon
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While you're there, you might also want to check out Open Salon - a pretty good venue for bloggers who have something interesting to say.