To my surprise, not many people outside of Zimbabwe know about the Blair Toilet. This revolutionary design for a long-drop toilet was developed at the Blair Research Institute for mass deployment in the rural areas of Zimbabwe, where diseases such as cholera and typhoid were rife. The toilet is easy to construct, but its design makes it very clean, hygienic, and free of flies. It is described here as "[using] little or no flush system, [being] odorless, free of insects, and [doubling] as a bathroom." There is a description of the mechanism here, but the basic idea is that the pit underneath the toilet has a chimney or vent - warm air rises out of this chimney, taking the smells and flies with it. There is also a sort of valve system created by the doorway and the positioning of the vent which means that flies always attempt to fly the wrong way, trapping themselves further.
The pure genius of the system inspired a doctor friend of mine to write the following:
Ode to the Blair Toilet (or: Privy Paean)
By Charl Oettle, 1982
You may sit upon this privy
Looking neat and clean and spivvy
And may wonder where the flies and odours went
Yes, the whole place smells of jasmine
And each fly is now a has-been
They've been flummoxed by the privy with the vent.
In the old days every toilet
(Though one tried so hard to foil it)
Smelled and reeked and ponged enough to make one faint,
And the flies bred out in dozens
With their uncles, aunts and cousins
And to use such privies one need be a saint.
Any other lesser mortal
As he staggered through the portal
Would break out in language loud and short and strong,
And to atavistic howls
He'd evacuate his bowels
Swatting flies and holding noses in the pong.
But these troubles now are ended
As the privy has been vented
And it's looking rather good and clean and fresh (tra la la);
In the sun the vent gets hotter,
And it sucks out quite a lotter
Smells and flies that bump their heads against the mesh.
Having flown so quick and nimbly
Up the hot and foetid chimbly
Now their brains and hopes are dashed and will is spent,
And they die, now ten, now twenty,
In their cesspit horn of plenty -
Vindication for the privy with the vent!
As mentioned last year, I applied for determination of South African citizenship, but the application took a lot longer than expected and then stalled. I ended up actually being the go-between for three different Home Affairs departments, one in Grahamstown, one in Paarl, and one in Pretoria. I literally phoned them, took messages, and passed those messages on to the other departments. My determination finally came through in about May, and it said that I was not eligible. Then the next day, apparently, it said I was. I'm not sure how it works, but all I know is that I can apply for citizenship. My grandparents are citizens, so I have to actually apply on my father's behalf, and then apply on my own behalf, through my father. Anyway, I have finally scraped all the paperwork together, and sent it in, and they said it'll come through in six months. That's February next year. Bated breath is with what I wait. Soon I can be PSA?
An excerpt from Life of Pi by Yann Martel:
After one year of high school, I attended the University of Toronto and took a double-major Bachelor's degree. My majors were religious studies and zoology. My fourth-year thesis for religious studies concerned certain aspects of the cosmogony theory of Isaac Luria, the great sixteenth-century Kabbalist from Safed. My zoology thesis was a functional analysis of the thyroid gland of the three-toed sloth. I chose the sloth because its demeanour--calm, quiet and introspective--did something to soothe my shattered self.
There are two-toed sloths and there are three-toed sloths, the case being determined by the forepaws of the animals, since all sloths have three claws on their hind paws. I had the great luck one summer of studying the three-toed sloth in situ in the equatorial jungles of Brazil. It is a highly intriguing creature. Its only real habit is indolence. It sleeps or rests on average twenty hours a day. Our team tested the sleep habits of five wild three-toed sloths by placing on their heads, in the early evening after they had fallen asleep, bright red plastic dishes filled with water. We found them still in place late the next morning, the water of the dishes swarming with insects. The sloth is at its busiest at sunset, using the word busy here in the most relaxed sense. It moves along the bough of a tree in its characteristic upside-down position at the speed of roughly 400 metres an hour. On the ground, it crawls to its next tree at the rate of 250 metres an hour, when motivated, which is 440 times slower than a motivated cheetah. Unmotivated, it covers four to five metres in an hour.
The three-toed sloth is not well informed about the outside world. On a scale of 2 to 10, where 2 represents unusual dullness and 10 extreme acuity, Beebe (1926) gave the sloth's senses of taste, touch, and its sense of smell a rating of 3. If you come upon a sleeping three-toed sloth in the wild, two or three nudges should suffice to awaken it; it will then look sleepily in every direction but yours. Why it should look about is uncertain since the sloth sees everything in a Magoo-like blur. Beebe reported that firing guns next to sleeping or feeding sloths elicited little reaction. And the sloth's slightly better sense of smell should not be overestimated. They are said to be able to sniff and avoid decayed branches, but Bullock (1968) reported that sloths fall to the ground clinging to decayed branches "often".
How does it survive, you might ask?
Precisely by being so slow. Sleepiness and slothfulness keep it out of harm's way, away from the notice of jaguars, ocelots, harpy eagles and anacondas. A sloth's hairs shelter an algae that is brown during the dry season and green during the wet season, so the animal blends in with the surrounding moss and foliage and looks like a nest of white ants or of squirrels, or like nothing at all but part of a tree.
The three-toed sloth lives a peaceful, vegetarian life in perfect harmony with its environment. "A good-natured smile is forever on its own lips," reported Tirler (1966). I have seen that smile with my own eyes. I am not one given to projecting human traits and emotions onto animals, but many a time during that month in Brazil, up at sloths in repose, I felt I was in the presence of upside-down yogis deep in meditation or hermits deep in prayer, wise beings whose intense imaginative lives were beyond the reach of my scientific probing.
Yesterday, August 9th, was Women's Day, which is a public holiday in South Africa. I didn't do much at all, basically just sat around in my underwear all day.
I did get thrown out of a couple of places, though.
As anybody who has studied English literature can tell you, drama is created by conflict. Without conflict, there is no drama. You can't tell a story about everybody getting along just fine. Whether the conflict is external (between Romeo's family and Juliet's family in an endless feud) or internal (between Hamlet and himself, undecided over what the best course of action is), there must be conflict before anything meaningful can happen.
This is true everywhere, however, not just in literature. You need conflict in your life - the "battle" gives you a goal, something that defines your life. How do you know whether you are achieving anything? You examine your conflict, and see how close you are to winning. Without this conflict, every day is the same. A man who has no conflict is, to be frank, boring - nothing happens in his life, it's empty. You can't talk to him about anything.
Having thought about it, I think there are two types of people in this area. There are those that consider the conflict in their lives to be a free-for-all battle against the rest of the world: they are on one side, with their allies, and everybody else is on the other side. The other type consider the conflict to be between those in the right, and those in the wrong, good-vs-bad. This latter type sounds a little dangerous - very fundamentalist. Everybody always accuses the Americans of being of this sort: they think that they are in the right, and that their enemies are in the wrong, and they use this as a justification for their actions. However, I think that the Americans are more of the free-for-all type: they think that the other side is wrong because it's the other side. They will denounce you as being unprincipled and terrorist if you criticize them, because you criticized them. They see it in terms of us and them, and then apply their principles to the situation afterwards, in order to justify it. By contrast, the good-vs-bad type will identify the principles they believe in, and will then defend those principles. I personally identify more with this latter type - I think it is a good thing to formalise what you think is good, then to do your best to be on that side.
I'd like to apply this dichotomy in the way people view conflict to two areas: software, and personal relationships.
Open Source advocates, I think, tend to be in the good-vs-bad camp. While some simply see Open Source as more practical than the proprietary way, a lot of advocates will fervently believe that not only is it more practical, but it is somehow right. Software wants to be free! It's wrong to withhold your code! I am definitely in this camp - I unfortunately get quite rabid about some of these issues. But one thing I've noticed is that many Open Source advocates are also activists in many other areas. The Rhodes/RUCUS geeks are all fervent Open Source advocates, and many of them are working on projects to bring computers, technology and education to underprivileged schools. The TuxLab phenomenon is well known: people give up a day of their time to go out and install computers in rural schools. They do this because they feel that it is the right thing to do. They are more often than not activists in other areas, too: most commonly politically.
On the other hand, Microsoft supporters (supporters, mind, not just people who are just using their software) tend to see the world as an us-vs-them battle. They license their software because they want to make money. More often than not, they will see no problem with charging exorbitant prices, if people are willing to pay them. They write software for personal gain, not because it needs doing. I know I am generalising badly here, but there is a definite trend in that direction, even if it is not always the case.
In personal relationships, this idea of conflict also applies. There are those who think that Liebe ist Krieg - love is war. You have to play your cards right to get what you want. Don't tell the other person how you feel too much, or too early - you have to keep your cards hidden, so you can play trump cards later. I've often noticed a strange phenomenon: two people who seem very loving and caring one week, once they break up, are venomously hateful to each other the next week. Their friends badmouth the other person, they are catty and mean. How can you go out with somebody for so long, and then do a complete 180 degree turn? The fact is, they are treating it as an us-vs-them conflict. If the person is not on your side, then they're the enemy. This is why you play mind-games during the relationship: it's a battle.
On the other hand, some people see it as a good-vs-bad battle. You're trying to do the right thing. You're open and honest. You lay your cards on the table, and so on. You consider that the relationship is a good relationship, and that the two of you are good for each other. Thus, you do your best to make it work.
Normally, people that do this get absolutely shredded by everybody else.
Being an us-vs-them fighter is often better for one personally. You're fighting for yourself, with whoever happens to be allied with you. If they don't ally with you, they become the enemy, and you can fight them tooth and nail as well. Since the only real principle is alliance, you can use any means to fight, be it dirty or not. On the other hand, a good-vs-bad fighter does not choose his opponents, he chooses his principles. Anybody aligned with his principles is his ally, whether he likes it or not. He cannot choose his methods, either - he must fight for the principles without betraying them. This is probably why he gets screwed so badly half the time.
Having said all this, I can't really think why you'd want to be a good-vs-bad fighter any more. Except that I think it's the right thing to do. However, somebody who was only interested in what was going to be best for himself (possibly an us-vs-them fighter?) would not choose that way, since it's bound to lose. He'd say, screw which way is the best to choose, I'm going with the way that's a winner. In other words, whichever way you see conflict, you're not going to change, because of the way you see conflict.
I'm not sure if that's bad or good.