and what are you going to do with that when you get it home?

in a society where the gap between the haves and the have-nots is ever widening, and your worth is measured by the things you own, the car you drive and the jewelry you wear, theft will always be a problem. which is why security screws on bathroom stalls make perfect sense. because you know, everyone is always trying to steal bathroom doors, and no one likes to take a dump with no door. it's totally undignified.


now i could understand, that yeah, maybe some high school kids decided it would be a funny prank to dismantle some bathroom stalls. maybe it even happened more than once, and to prevent it from happening again the school installed security screws. that might explain why ONE bathroom somewhere in the midwest might have security screws installed, but certainly not the fact that the vast majority of public restrooms use them.

i've been thinking about this off and on for quite a while, mostly whilst crapping in a public restroom. i have two theories, neither of which seem very reasonable:

1) bathroom stall theft is a widespread problem

2) all bathroom stalls are manufactured by a single company, which also happens to manufacture security screws

but wait, there's more! recently, i was in a bathroom that used TWO DIFFERENT KINDS of security screws. basically, each bracket or hinge had four screws on each side, two of one type and two of another type, meaning you would need to have two security screw bits in order to steal the stall. again, i can come up with only two explanations, and again, neither of them seem very reasonable:

1) it is a marketing ploy by bathroom stall manufacturers, in order to be able to make the claim that their stalls are more secure than their competitors.

2) bathroom stall thieves have wised up and starting carrying the more common type of security screw bits around with them, forcing bathroom stall makers to take more drastic measures in order to protect their "customers".

brb, potty.

random posts

a large flock of crows has decided to take up residence in the trees just outside our house for the last couple days. there are hundreds of them and they're pretty damn creepy, especially at night. they also appear to have singled out my car for some reason and it has paid for it dearly.

tax code is retardedly complicated. i started doing our taxes this week. this year, i have converted a personal residence to an investment property which had expenses but made no money in 2008, gotten married and moved to virginia, laura sold some stock, exercised some stock options and made some contributions to a retirement account that she was not eligible for. i had some stock that was transferred from one brokerage account to another brokerage and then sold. that means one married-filing-jointly federal return, one married-filing-separately partial year state return for maryland, one married-filing-separately partial year state return for virginia and one married-filing-separately virginia state return. flat tax anyone?

we watched sweeny todd last night. laura and i agree that it would have been awesome if the italian barber had been played by dave arabian.

i've been listing to all my cds on my computer at work in alphabetical order by album name. this morning i hit the "greatest hits" block of albums. there look to be about 13 of them.