Blog of Bermanism

We all went to see the new Star Wars, Episode III on Friday night. After the disappointment of the last two episodes, we were all a little leery of what may come of this movie. The last two movies not only featured horrible dialog, but an overabundance of computer generated special effects and a lack of plot development. The episodes improved in quality from the first to the second, but they were still not what audiences expected from Lucas. I happened to actually like the first two episodes, but I like anything that has spaceships, fantasy, and things blowing up all the time.

Since we had waited a week to see Episode III, we had all heard that this movie was much better than the other two. Well, the rumors were right. The plot in Episode III progresses at a feverish pace from the point at which the last movie left off. Beginning with the growing friendship between Chancellor Palpatine and Anakin Skywalker and leading to the birth of Darth Vader as we all know him from the original Star Wars movies. The plot development was much better orchestrated in Episode III than in the first two and the CGI special effects took less of the main stage from the actors. Although most of the movie was CGI-based, I felt that the computerized nature of the movie was less apparent.

On the CGI note, there is simply no better group of artists and programmers on the planet for CGI special effects than those at Industrial Light and Magic. Lucas’ group took CGI to a whole new level in Episodes I and II, to the point of being shocking and uncomfortable to audiences. They may have gone a little too far with the Jarjar Biggs character, but for the most part, they were breaking new ground. ILM has further outdone themselves in Episode III. The special effects in this movie were absolutely stunning! The textures and rendering methods used in this film were the most realistic that I have seen yet. Computer graphic special effects generally end up having a robotic, cartoon-like appearance and movement, but ILM managed to breathe life into the characters such that, you might think that Yoda was actually a living, breathing actor playing a role. I, of course, miss the days of Henson’s puppeteers running the Yoda model, but they did a great job with this film.

By far the most disappointing part of Episode III was the dialog and the character interaction. This issue was difficult to pin down because, on the surface, it appeared that the actors were simply doing a terrible job of acting. But, when you look at the cast, which includes brilliant and notably accomplished actors like Samuel L. Jackson, Ewan McGregor, Ian McDiarmit, Jimmy Smits, and Frank Oz, you have to believe that the problem must lie elsewhere. Now, in fairness, I have seen Natalie Portman play a few brilliant roles, like the role of Sam that she played in Garden State with Zach Braff, and, though I have never seen Hayden Christiansen in any other movie than Star Wars, I hear he did a good job in Life as a House. However, since these two were the leading roles in the movie, they appeared to be doing the worst job of acting, by a lot. You could essentially take a nap every time Padame and Anakin were in a room together. Their interactions were stale and robotic and added nothing to the movie, not to mention the fact that what they said to each other was stupid, cheesy, mostly inappropriate for the scene, and totally unbelievable. So, given that there were a whole slew of accomplished actors in the movie, one had to give way to the writing and dialog as the source of the problem. A suppose a chef is only as good as his ingredients. It appears that even accomplished actors, like those in Episode III, have trouble making a believable character out of bad writing. I also believe that since the majority of the movie was shot on a blue screen with no props and very little person-person interaction, that the actors had a hard time getting into their roles. Since they couldn’t see their surroundings and they couldn’t see the person they were talking to or interacting with most of the time, I would imagine that it was difficult to give anything more than a stale performance. Naturally, Lucas has introduced the movie industry to an entirely different view of movie making which takes real-life actors and places them into a computer generated fantasy, instead of the current model which accomplishes the opposite. So, the bottom line is that I don’t blame the actors for doing a bad job acting, I blame the writing and the newness of this style of movie making. In addition, superb direction could have captured the spirit of the characters and turned the acting debacle into something entirely pleasant to watch. I believe the Lucas’ directing abilities died along with Darth Vader in Episode VI, the Return of the Jedi.

So, overall, this movie was very enjoyable. The plot was great, it moved along at a very invigorating pace, and it accomplished what audiences wanted from the movie, the birth of the Empire. Though bad dialog prevailed and the people watching the movie would just shudder at the words coming out of the actors mouths, I thought that this movie was very enjoyable. It certainly added great perspective to the original Star Wars movies and I will go back and watch those with new-found interest at knowing the history leading up to that point. I personally believe that the first two movies were unnecessary. They probably could have summed up the first two movies in about 20 minutes at the beginning of the third movie, but overall the series was enjoyable and I’m sure that they will become the same sort of cult classics that the originals became in the years to come. Much of what audiences found distasteful about these movies is the amount of innovation included in them. The original movies carried with them much the same sort of stigma as these movies, and their success was unparalleled as time went on. I think that as more of this style of movie come out, the Star Wars movies will become more popular. Anyway, go see Episode III if you are a Star Wars fan, or just enjoyed watching the originals, but make sure you see or review Episodes I and II first. You’ll be a little lost if you don’t.

Once again, it has been a little while since my last post. I’ve had a lot going on. Rachel and I went to Dallas last weekend for her life-long friend Michelle’s wedding to Joel, who just happens to be the brother of the famous David Garza. We weren’t sure how this wedding would go, since it was a marriage between a Jewish British woman and a Hispanic Catholic man, but we were pleasantly surprised by a beautiful ceremony (which was outside on the hottest day of the year, my only complaint) that was complete with a nine piece mariachi band with violins and everything. Afterward, the reception was very nice. Good food, good music, and people were generally having a good time. The end of the evening was marked by Michelle’s singing of a Pasty Kline song for her new husband with accompaniment by David, followed by a one-song performance by David. It was really great to see him perform again, since Michelle and I used to go see him all the time in college. Michelle also has a phenomenal singing voice, and she brought down the house. Rachel and I think that she should be on American Idol. She could go really far with it. It was also very nice to see my in-laws, I hadn’t seen them in ages. We’ll be heading back to Dallas on June 17th, this time joined by our entire rowing team for the Bachman Lake Annual Sprint Trials (BLAST), which is being hosted by the Dallas Rowing Club on June 18th. It should be a good time!

This last weekend, the focus of my main manuscript became clear to me, finally! It turns out that the most interesting thing about my data was the manner in which we analyzed it and that all of the brain regions that I’m studying are acting independently, meaning that different complements of genes are being activated in each region, with very little overlap (if you have no idea what I’m talking about, see this post). Alcohol scientists have known this implicitly for a long time, but have never really explored or quantified this phenomenon. Anyway, this realization made the purpose and the focus of the paper very apparent to me. It turns out that my professor had been telling me this for quite some time, but I just wasn’t hearing it. Either way, I am currently making the main showcase figure for the paper around which most of the paper will be written. I’m on a mission now to have the first rough draft of this paper done by Tuesday, June 7th. Here’s hoping!

On another note, I spent the last few days fixing a few of the major errors with my array analysis database system. It now performs very complicated searches of the data on any data set successfully, and doesn’t only work on my data set. This fix has made a few lovely ladies in my lab very happy. They were reeling at the thought of having to resort to Excel for their analysis. So, this is a good thing and it makes me much happier to publish it as-is, since I know it is now working with its intended function. I’ll write that paper and package up my array analysis suite of software for download once my alcohol paper is complete. Then, I’ll be ready for my defense! YAY!

Random Stuff:

• We’re off to see the new Star Wars, Episode III movie tonight. I’m sure I’ll be posting my review of it tomorrow.
• The summer heat is already in full swing in Texas, and we’ve been melting under the hot sun and high humidity for the last two weeks. Today offered a little reprieve though, it is actually a comfortable 80 something this morning.
• I still haven’t have the opportunity to install and try out Mac OS X Tiger, but I’ve heard nothing but good things about it. Hopefully, I can get to that this weekend.
• I want to also install Mandriva (the conglomerate of Mandrake and Connectiva Linuses) Linux LE2005 (basically, Mandrake 10.2) at home and test that out. The guys at ICES say that it is a big improvement over 10.1.
• My two best friends, Chris and Brandon, are coming into Austin this weekend for Memorial Day weekend. Brandon is competing in the Capitol of Texas Triathlon on Monday and we’re going to cheer him on. If you’re in Austin, come on down and help us cheer him on starting at 6:30am on Monday at Auditorium Shores. It should be a great time!
• I’ve now lost a total of 21 lbs. rowing! I’ve gone from my heaviest at 210, to 189, and still falling. Thank you Rachel for getting me back into it. I’ll never stop doing it again. If you’re interested in getting into rowing in Austin, check out the Austin Rowing Club’s Introduction to Rowing course. I promise you’ll love it!

I’ll be in the throes of writing over the next few weeks, so my posting frequency could either increase or decrease. Either way, there will be more to come. Thanks for reading!

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As many of you know, Rachel and I are avid rowers. Since many of the posts on this blog may be about rowing in the future, I’ve decided to write a little introduction to the technicalities of the sport so that you can better understand what I’m talking about when I write about rowing.

We row what are referred to as shells. There are many different kinds of boats needing from one to nine people to successfully row them, and there are two styles of rowing, sweep and sculling. In sweep rowing, each person in a boat requires only a single, large oar and the direction of the oars are placed so that each person rowing in the boat is rowing on the opposite side of the person in front of them. There are three major kinds of sweep boats that we row, a pair, a four, and an eight (denoted in rowing script 2-, 4-/+, 8+) What do the pluses mean? Many of the sweep style boat require an additional person in the boat in order to steer and direct it. This person is called a coxswain, or cox for short. The pluses after 4+ and 8+ mean that the shell has a place for, and requires a coxswain to function. A coxswain or cockswain was at first referred to as the swain (boy servant) in charge of the small cock or cockboat that was kept aboard for the ship’s captain and which was used to row him to and from the ship. The term has been in use in England dating back to at least 1463. With the passing of time the coxswain became the helmsman of any boat, regardless of size, including crew boats. The boats that are 2- and 4-, do not have a place for a coxswain, and are thus called a pair and a straight four. Here are the configurations of a 2-, 4+ and 8+:

These boats are very fun to row, and the pair is certainly one of the hardest boats to row, since two people, each with only one oar, can potentially pull the boat in circles if one is significantly stronger or rows longer than the other person. They need to be quite well matched.

In the other style of rowing, called sculling, each person has two, smaller oars. This arrangement allows for more efficient transfer of power to the water (meaning the boats are faster than their sweep equivalents), but the technique is more difficult to master, since you now have two oars to deal with. The types of boats in this category are a single, a double, a quad (denoted 1x, 2x, and 4x). None of these boats require a coxswain to steer them, mainly because the boats are too small for that. So, the person sitting in the bow seat, steers the boat with a cable that is attached to one of his feet which turns the rudder on the boat. This style of steering is usually only present in the 4x, and sometimes in the 2x if that boat can be converted to a 2-. Here are the configurations of a 1x, 2x, and 4x:

The single is perhaps the hardest boat out of all the styles to row. It is nice because it only needs one person to row it, but the boats generally weigh 18-20 or so pounds, are 15-20 feet long and are only 1 foot wide. My butt usually hangs over the side of the boat when I’m rowing it. So, it is really difficult to balance the boat and there is a lot less room for error in your rowing technique.

When looking at the pictures above, you might wonder which direction people sit. When you’re looking at the inside of a real boat, it is pretty easy to figure out because the foot stretchers (the place where you strap your feet in) are facing the right direction. In these boats, the people rowing face the stern, or the front of the boat, and they pull and propel the boat towards the bow (or rear) of the boat. So, yes, these boats are literally rowed backwards from normal boats. In fact, the rowers row with their backs facing the direction of motion the entire time. The person in the bow seat of a non-coxed boat must constantly look over their shoulders to make sure that the boat is on course and isn’t about to hit something. This person either has to steer with his/her foot, or tell the rest of the boat to put more pressure on one side or the other in order to steer it. This position in the boats is call the bow seat, or simply bow. The seats in any type of boats are numbered from the bow seat (which is number 1) to the stern-most seat, which can be anywhere from number 2 to number 8. The stern-most seat also has a special name and function, and is known as the stroke seat. The person in the stroke seat sets the pace for the entire boat. It is extremely important for the entire boat to row exactly alike. Everyone must put their oars into the water at the same time (called the catch in rowing), and everyone must take their oars out of the water at the same time (called the finish, or release). Also, they must keep their bodies perfectly centered and keep their oars at the same height on the recovery (when the oars are not in the water) and the same depth during the drive (when the oars are in the water). The stroke seat is the person in the front whom everyone must follow. If the stroke seat is not rowing in a very regular, easy to follow fashion, it will throw the whole boat out of sync. Naturally, if a person is rowing a single, that person functions as bow and stroke simultaneously, so it is a big job.

There are two sides to every boat, right and left. However, right and left are in the eye of the beholder, which is why each side was named either starboard or port, following traditional mariner terminology. Port and starboard are shipboard terms for left and right, respectively. Confusing those two could cause a ship wreck since two boats must pass on the starboard side of each other. In Old England, the starboard was the steering paddle or rudder, and ships were always steered from the right side on the back of the vessel. Larboard referred to the left side, the side on which the ship was loaded. So how did larboard become port? Shouted over the noise of the wind and the waves, larboard and starboard sounded too much alike. The word port means the opening in the “left” side of the ship from which cargo was unloaded. Sailors eventually started using the term to refer to that side of the ship. Use of the term “port” was officially adopted by the U.S. Navy by General Order, 18 February 1846 and has been adopted in all forms of recreational watercraft in the time since then. In a crew boat, if you are facing the stern (front), your left side is facing starboard, while your right side is facing port. The sides are reversed in normal boats that actually move in the direction of the stern. So in sweep rowing, you either have a starboard or a port oar. In sculling, you have both a starboard and a port oar. The person steering the boat, whether it be the bow seat or a coxswain, refers to these sides in order to control the boats and shout commands to everyone.

Anyway, Rachel and I are a part of the competitive teams at the Austin Rowing Club. Our goal is to train for competitions at the masters level, which is age 26 and above. There are basically two types of races, a sprint and a head race. A sprint can last for either 1000 or 2000 meters and a head race can last for 4500 – 6000 meters. Naturally, the strategies for each type of race are different, but they are all a lot of fun.

Rowing is extremely hard work and a very good type of exercise. I definitely recommend it to anyone who wants to try it. It is addicting the better at it you get and the more you start to see results from your hard work. The other aspect of rowing are the people. Pretty much everyone on our teams and the recreational teams are great people and a lot of fun. Rowing is a very social sport and the people reflect this aspect. It is a great stress reliever and something that I will hopefully continue to do for the rest of my life.

We returned from Memphis last night at around 9:00. It was a very good trip, and it turned out to be a great thing. Now, with a new team working on it and giving it the necessary care and precision, my software will live on and hopefully begin to really help others with their research, and I’ll get a publication out of the deal, one that I plan to start writing today.

Yesterday was largely spent getting my program installed and operational on their servers. It actually took a lot of effort to make it work this way. I had to install all of the libraries that were missing on their system, a few programs that my system depends on, and I had to rewrite some parts of my code to be more dynamic, so that the physical location of the program could be changed fairly easily. I managed to get it all together by around 3:30pm, then I helped their systems guys set up their server farm to do load balancing, which will hopefully have the effect of speeding up WebQTL and the Alcohol Research Integrator (the new name of my program, ARI; no, I didn’t name it) significantly.

This trip was tiring, but very good. The meetings, programming and systems work were all very efficiently done and I think everyone walked away with a positive feeling about our interaction. I enjoyed and appreciated the hospitality and cordiality of the Williams lab, and I’m looking forward to the collaboration that was forged these last few days. Much thanks to the Williams lab!

My professor (Susan Bergeson), Igor Ponomarev (a post-doc), and myself traveled to Memphis, Tennessee this morning to meet with a professor here named Robert Williams. Dr. Williams is the creator and curator of an analysis software suite called WebQTL, which is now a part of a larger system known as the GeneNetwork. Many people in the alcohol field utilize these utilities and it is cool to be where it is run and created. We are here to discuss incorporating some of my work into this system.

Not long ago, I wrote a database system that allows me to store my microarray data and to perform complex meta-analyses on it in a manner that would be quite impossible using the standard set of microarray analysis tools, such as Excel. Well, it turns out that the database schema and the combination of analysis methods is very useful to a broad range of people. Additionally, the project caught the eye of one of the head administrators at the NIAAA (NIH) who was immediately impressed by our initiative to share our data in a publicly accessible manner. Since the system that I wrote operates on a server that I maintain, and I’m hopefully leaving graduate school soon and will no longer be able to maintain this system, Dr. Bergeson and I began looking for alternative ways to maintain the database system, expand it into the type of system that it could become, and to get help with the personnel required to make the system operational. Dr. Bergeson had shown Dr. Williams my system, who, being impressed with the design, suggested that the system be integrated into the GeneNetwork. The administrator at NIAAA was excited by the proposition of a public repository for microarray data and offered to fund the project through NIAAA without a grant proposal. Being that this seemed like a great opportunity for all parties involved, we boarded a plane to Memphis to hash out the details of this collaboration.

So, today has been filled with meetings and discussions regarding the transfer of my concept to the existing system here. I’ve talked with the sysadmins and programmers around here, showed them my system (down to the table structure in the database), and outlined my vision for future development of the system into a fully integrated public repository and analysis tool for microarray data. None of their heads exploded at the thought of all of this, so that was positive. They have been very receptive to the ideas and they seem to be very ready to give me full credit for the idea. Things are very encouraging.

After the meeting, we checked into our hotel and headed out to dinner at a place called Texas de Brazil. It is a lot like the restaurant Fogo de Chao in Dallas and Houston. It was very good and it was fun to have dinner with Rob and his wife. Afterward, we went to see the Peabody Hotel, which is apparently a big historical site here where Faulkner had his meetings and discussions. They have this thing about having live ducks in the main lobby fountain that are there all day, then they take them up to the roof and put them in their “Duck Palace” for the night. After that, we walked down Beale St, which is the social center of town and has a lot of live blues music. Tuesday night was pretty quiet down there, but it was a nice walk anyway.

So, we’re back at the hotel and really tired. We’re going to turn in early and have another day of meeting tomorrow, and try to get some things decided. More on that tomorrow.

Everyone knows that the bathroom is where some of the more unfortunate parts of one’s life occur. In general, a trip to the bathroom is private, and no one would really want to spend any length of time there with you. There are good reasons for this, as the activities that occur in the bathroom are generally accompanied by unpleasant smells, sounds, and other such things that most people would just assume not think about. Well, this is all well and good, as long as the bathroom is in the privacy of your own home, and you can close and lock the door and not worry about having to share your bathroom excursion with anyone else. As we all know, the tune of this life activity changes fairly rapidly when venturing into a public restroom, especially the men’s room.

Growing up with my mother, I learned early on that is isn’t polite, nice, or OK in any fashion to pee on the toilet seat, the rim of the toilet, the floor, or anything else in the bathroom that isn’t the water inside the toilet. I had to always pick up the seat, aim into the water, and make sure that I did this at such an angle that controlled the amount of splash back from the water so as to avoid messing up the rim of the toilet. Apparently, I’m the only man alive who ever learned this lesson.

Imagine if you will, a place where time stands still, where personal hygiene is suspended in the unknown ether that is the typical male psyche. This place is known as, the UT Molecular Biology Building’s (MBB) 1st floor Men’s bathroom south. This is apparently the most public restroom in our building, and it is used by people in our wing, by construction workers, and by various vagrant elements who happen to wander in off the street. Now, imagine a man, just out walking across campus in 95+ degree heat, and he suddenly has to pee. He enters the nearest building, which is MBB. Once inside the vestibule of the restroom, he sees that the room is divided into two sections, the front section has stalls, the back section has urinals. Out of respect and understanding for the people who have to use this bathroom on a daily basis, this person heads immediately for the stalls. He looks down at the toilet and is relieved to see that a pristine, clean toilet seat is already in the down position. So, not needing to touch anything, he whips it out and starts to pee. Now, because this person is a careful type of person, he doesn’t look at all at the unpleasant stream of harsh yellow pee that is aimed somewhere in the vicinity of the flush handle and the toilet seat, and proceeds to pee all over everything, getting only 1/3 of the intended volume into the pot. Then, feeling much better and having thoroughly enjoyed the fire-polished granite walls inside the stall, he zips up and walks out, making sure not to stop to flush the toilet, clean up the seat that he just messed up, and certainly not bothering to stop and wash his hands before leaving, so that he can effectively spread his nastiness to everyone and everything he touches for the next 2 hours. This is the typical behavior of any male that goes into this bathroom.

Now, imagine that an HVAC worker who has been crawling through 100+ degree duct work all morning long, trying to desperately to get the air conditioning working again in the building, has to take a crap. He ventures into the bathroom, and appropriately doesn’t even give the urinals a thought. He ventures into the newly peed in stall, closes the door, Pulls down his pants, and sits directly in the large splattered puddle of pee that was recently placed in so eloquent a fashion upon the seat. Not noticing that his ass is now covered in some vagrant’s pee, he releases the hold his anal sphincter has on his colon, thus releasing an alternating, yet surprisingly constant stream of poo and farts that resonate loudly and effectively through the entire restroom, leaving the impression of a series of fast deflating balloons and a round of black cats going of simultaneously. This explosion of excrement manages to only half reach the water since the man is doubled over on himself trying to get the maximum amount of pressure to his innards so that the unfortunate business can be over more quickly. Thus, half of the fallout lands on the rear of the toilet bowl, about six inches from any water surface, 1/4 splashes back off the water and up onto the bottom of the toilet seat and the worker’s ass (a fine mixture of excrement and the previous person’s pee, that still wasn’t flushed), and the rest finds its natural home in the water of the bowl. The worker suddenly gets a call on his NexTel wireless phone. “Yeah!”, he answers. “Unintelligible banter from someone who doesn’t know that microphones distort if you talk to close to them,” comes back. After a brief translation period, the worker responds in a similar tone with a series of acronyms that mean nothing to anyone else. This is immediately followed by an urgent, “Hold on!” What follows is a more powerful blast of feces and methane gas, along with some undigested corn and beer stagnate left over from the night before, this time also carrying with it a strong waft of a pile of week-old dead monkeys left to rot in the swamp. Mid-crap, the guy responds to the call again, while continuing the eruption from his now molten ass. This goes on for a while, leaving anyone else is the room without a few layers of skin from the natural chemical peel they just received, and the wonderment at what this guy has been eating to make such a terrible substance occur in his gut.

Meanwhile, three more people come into the bathroom. They all head for the urinals and begin to pee. Another person follows quickly into the restroom. He stops, glances around, notices that all possible deposit zones are taken (one stall by me, the observer) and decides that the best course of action is to relieve himself into one of the nice clean sinks in the room. So, he unzips, props himself precariously up on the counter and pees into the sink. Midway, he decides that he should turn on the water, but he turns it on too hard and the pee/water mixture ends up splattering with artful purpose onto the mirror and the surrounding countertop. Not caring, the man finishes up, turns off the water, hops down and leaves, along with the other three men who used the urinals, none of them flushing them or washing their hands, although one does stop to gaze at his manliness in the mirror for several seconds, smiles and then quickly returns to his business. Meanwhile, the worker in the stall has nearly exhausted his supply of toxic beer/burger/coffee waste from the night before and this morning, so he finally stops talking on the phone, and unrolls the majority of the toilet paper roll that is there. He throws the paper on the floor where it is easier to reach, contorts himself, takes about 7 feet of the paper, wads it up and grinds any danglers back into his crevasse. Then he wipes like this 3 more times, stands up, pulls back on his pants and turns around to flush the now decimated toilet. The flush begins, but then halts suddenly when the 17 tons of toilet paper used for the three progressive and wholly efficient wipes gets lodged into the drainage portion of the toilet. This action leaves behind the pleasant mixture of two people’s urine, the blasting out of the worst the universe has to offer, and waterlogged toilet paper made from one entire redwood tree. Shrugging his shoulders, the worker goes to the non-peed in sink, and thoroughly washes his hands and face and arms with soap and water, then untucks his filthy shirt, and wipes his hands and face on it. He then proceeds out of the bathroom.

As the worker leaves the land of death, mutation, destruction, and chaos, a poor soul enters the misty and dark land of the MBB bathroom with the intention of brushing his teeth after a very garlic-laden lunch. The person seems to be unaware that his skin is dying with every second of exposure to the toxic fumes and that his lungs will be irreparably scarred from the experience. He proceeds immediately to the sink in that contains the healthy splattering of pee all around on inside of it. He wets his tooth brush and emphatically and repeatedly bangs it right in a puddle of the now stale urine from the last visitor. He then loads on the paste a does a quick 2-second once over of every surface in his mouth. he then rinses the brush, sets it in another splattering of urine, spits and rinses out his mouth. He then collects the toothbrush and wanders into the deadliest of stalls with the intention of peeing, only to find the beginnings of the formation of a doorway to Hell. He, naturally, huffs in disapproval and promptly leaves the room, leaving a quiet, green, haze lingering in the atmosphere and the feeling that a serious battle recently took place here.

Having been an observer to this debacle, I tried to get up the courage to continue living while I cleaned myself up, flushed, washed my hands in the other part of the bathroom and left with the intention of never returning to that bathroom ever again.

This story is a conglomerate of several unholy bathroom experiences that I have had during my time in the MBB building. Peoples’ bathroom habits are seriously appalling and I shudder to think of these peoples’ home bathrooms. I’m sure that the women in my life would have something equally nasty in a different way to say about their bathroom experiences, but this will do for now, as we leave the realm of the MBB 1st floor Men’s Restroom South…