German Ridiculosity Part 1: The Poop Shelf

In this first installment of things I find absolutely ridiculous, silly, funny, annoying or just plain weird about life in Germany, I would like to point my American friends to the ubiquitous presence in German toilets of the so-called "poop shelf:"

Historically, the purpose of the poop shelf was to allow one to examine one's waste for worms and the like, but today the function (as I understand it) of this crap-tastically unnecessary slab of porcelain is to allow you to take a good long look at the magnificent dookie you have just taken before flushing it down to the bowels (no pun intended) of the German netherworld, never to be seen again.

This pooperific piece of German engineering allows you to take real pride in your fecal matter - not only by giving you a rather explicit visual experience of the glorious dump it took you half an article of Titanic to produce, but also by raising your turds that much closer to your olfactory glands, allowing you (whether you like it or not) to take a nice, deep whiff of the kids you just dropped off at the proverbial pool. (Of course, the pool metaphor seems inappropriate here.)

I leave you all with a reflection on the semiotic triangle of toilets by eccentric philosopher Slavoj Žižek. And I challenge us all to make an attempt to "directly confront" our excrement lest we forget that "...as soon as you flush, you're right in the middle of ideology."