You sir are a sick man and I am practically wetting my pants with laughter.

I did have a near takeoff flight toilet episode coming out of Antigua on an Airbus 340.

My wife had to tell the flight attendant that I was still in the 'bathroom' and they delayed the take off because of me...

Bad Caribbean food can do wonders... I think people clapped when I came out. I probably bowed. I bow to chair lifts too after crashing on the ski slope...

There goes another keyboard, killed by the old soda-out-the-nose trick. Thankfully, I have spares on hand.

Is this some bizarre plan to stimulate the economy?

Mr. Keillor,

Were you on drugs when you wrote this?

'nuf said.

Mr Keillor has clearly taken to that very Midwestern habit of smoking marijuana.

Hooray!

this reminded me of the horrible, horrible story of the little girl whose intestines were literally sucked out of her when she sat on the filter of a backyard pool. After weeks of what must have been excruciating pain and agony, she finally died. If Garrison has never heard of this story, then OK, but if he has, the whole thing is in questionable taste.

In any case, it is not really all that funny to think of unsuspecting airline passengers stuck (ahem) in a potentially life-threatening situation. Sorry, Garrison. Your sometimes black humor has hit a sour note with me this time.

I thought it was going to be about how to avoid 'stuff' splashing you on the tushie when you pull the handle, not having your insides ripped out like a six year old stuck on a swimming pool grate...

presented to the stewardess who was brave enough to go below the call of doody and stick her finger where the bottom line of those accounts matched up.

and isn't it really 'brown' humor?

There is some real profound insight into human nature in that one, having to do with the fact that no one would ever consider doing it, unless they had been told not to.

The authority, Snopes, has an article on it:

http://www.snopes.com/travel/airline/toilet.asp

In addition, Mythbusters also completely busted this myth.

Pardon the expression, but *flush*.

In the early '80s, I was flying from Boston to New York on the Eastern Shuttle. We had been waiting a while to takeoff. The man next to me asked if he could use the bathroom and the flight attendant said yes.

A minute later the pilot announced that we were about to takeoff. I looked for my seat companion, but he was not around. I imagined that he found a quick seat elsewhere.

After takeoff, he came back to the seat and explained that he was in the airplane bathroom when we took off. There was no seatbelt in there he explained, but otherwise he did just fine.

Three decades ago a hapless physical plant worker at a large California university flushed while seated. Unfortunately, his co-workers had made a slight mistake and crossed the steam line into the supply line (their version of a practical joke). He did heal.

"parker house roll" = brilliant!

but there's something (some kind of liquid and/or solvent) that you are never, ever supposed to pour into the stuff they have down in the tank of an airplane toilet.

If you make that mistake, it creates a volcano of blue stuff/feces erupting from the toilet.

Maybe it's mentos?

before you voted for Obama.

tomreedtoon asks "And for that matter, what about the "blue ice" from those toilets that drops off planes and crushes people's roofs?"

I don't know about crushing people's rooves, but the blue ice was implicated in spreading cholera and other diseases throughout the world. Someone noticed that when the outbreak locations were plotted on a map of the world, they followed the lines of major air routes...

...an icy BM.

Thank you, I'm here all week.

Actually, since Mr Keillor's column dealt with airline travel, he was clearly trying to make sport of all the people who died when the 9-11 airliners were crashed into buildings. Not funny, Garrison.

If there is a way that the airlines can f*ck something up and and make their passengers/customers miserable, they will do it.

Every time.

some of the most totally boring people on the planet.

This was just ANOTHER funny article by GC.

It was only the second time I'd ever flown, and it was during an overnight trans-atlantic flight from NY to Zurich. I was young, too young to drink alcohol or take a tranquilizer, and I did not like to fly. But I had to pee. I simply could not hold it any longer. Just as I opened the bathroom door at the very end of the aisle, a man sitting in the last row leaned over and said to me, "When you flush, you can see the ocean below..." I've never forgotten those words. And I've never used the bathroom on an airplane since.

from Chuck Palahniuk's gem of a novel, "Haunted".

Then tell us how comical this 'flush-while-seated' tale is!

{"Guts" is best read after you have recently eaten. =)}

and words to live by as well.

The thing you are not supposed to put down an airplane toilet is explained in this article, from Salon's own Patrick Smith.

http://dir.salon.com/story/tech/col/smith/2002/10/03/askthepilot13/print.html

for the link to the article!

...For instance...

- What about those of us who have already stuck our tongue on a pump handle, and learned from the experience never to WANT TO do it again? We wander through life avoiding pump handles in the winter months and gently creeping around them during the summer for fear that they might still retain some of their pain-inducing attractiveness. And just because we don't WANT TO do it again, doesn't mean that we won't, either by accident or coercion. And so we live the rest of our lives in a state of mistrust regarding anything that vaguely looks like a pump handle, thereby cutting ourselves off from the wanton pleasures of baseball, wood chopping, hockey, etc...

- What about those of us who have observed someone else sticking their tongue on a pump handle, and have learned from THEIR experience never to want to do the same? We take pride in patting ourselves on the back for being so well endowed with wisdom that we could learn from the mistakes of others, and yet we sit uneasy with the suspicion that the world knows something that we don't and we hold our manhoods a little cheaper thinking of those who have fought in the trenches of tongue-pump warfare and come back to boast about it.

- What about those who have never had the opportunity to slobber their linguas against anything to which they might adhere? Not having had the experience of a teacher, fireman, parent or other authority figure pour warm water over their protruding tongues and getting their faces soaked at the same time that their friends stood around mocking them, they might very well grow up smugly believing themselves to be superior to all challenges in life...until that first great personal disaster came along to knock them on their keester, and prove to them that...they really knew absolutely nothing.

- There is a certain category of person who keeps licking pump handles because they believe that one day, and this might be the one, the tongue will not stick and they shall rewrite the book of aphorisms that their parents hold in such high regard. Then, the world will sit up and take notice of them, yessireebob. They form part of the 16% of the population that believe that they will acquire their retirement funding from a winning lottery ticket.

- And then there are the rich kids, whose fathers had long ago run a heating coil around the base of the pump to keep it unfrozen during the winter months. They stick their tongues to their pump handles willy-nilly as if to imply that their breeding and wealth enable them to do so, totally unaware that they had been born on third base and hadn't actually hit a triple. Life doesn't offer many opportunities to prove them wrong, and even when it does, the lesson that wisdom is more important than knowledge remains unlearned.

Personally... I have fought my childhood battle with our pump handle and we walked away from each other agreeing to a truce: I won't lick it, and it won't cause me pain and embarrassment. Wisdom isn't one big rock that needs to be moved. It's a ton of pebbles carried one at a time.

- ejb -