"Night soil," or when America's cities were full of crap (and crap-removal campaign finance enhancement).

It's been like shooting fish in a barrel this week. The more degraded Oz gets, the richer the comedic possibilities.

Is it still night soil if the doggies do-do it?

The 19th-Century Night Soil Men Who Carted Away America’s Waste, by Adee Braun (Atlas Obscura)

On a summer day in 1873, a cart stood on 6th Avenue in New York City filled to the brink with raw human waste. The cart was uncovered—its contents exposed to the air and to the passers-by who retched and gagged as they scurried away. Excrement dipped off the sides of the cart, and the sidewalks and gutters were smeared with the stuff. The stench was so strong that it could be smelled from more than a block away. It was another day in pre-sewer America.

Before municipal sewer systems, excreta piled up in the privies of people’s homes—essentially a deep hole in the ground. But these poop storage units did not have unlimited capacity.

When the privies were eventually filled, that’s when the night soil men were called in.

Speaking of Major Move(ment)s ...

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 ...