Posted on 05/17/2005 7:02:04 PM PDT by anymouse
There's a bit of an urban legend going around you may have heard of on some of the whackier conspiracy sites, scrawled on motorway underpass walls, in drunken conversations with that guy who sits in the corner talking to himself down at the pub and in a major American weekly newsmagazine that US interrogators in Gitmo flushed a copy of the Quran down a toilet.
The death toll from the ensuing riots is somewhere south of twenty right now, but may rise, so clearly this story is of some major significance. So we here at the Silent Running Center for Scientific Journalistic Research decided to put this story to an empircal test to prove once and for all if there is any possible truth to it.
Now obviously we were not going to use an actual copy of the Quran for this test. For one thing, most of those things are quite heavy, being in hardback editions, mostly green, often with embossed covers, and we wanted to make this as fair a trial as possible. And for another, we have this odd desire to keep our heads attatched to our shoulders.
Instead, for the purposes of research we went out and got a copy of another Holy Book, "Stupid White Men" by Michael Moore. It was a paperback, which we felt would give it a much better chance of attaining maximum flushability that anything in hardback. Also, it's a pile of crap and the toilet is where it belongs anyway. It cost us $21.00, and we mean that in a very real, and tax-deductible way.
Here is is, ready to be put to the test.
For this experiment, we used a standard Australian flush toilet, which are capable of releasing a 0.8-gallon flush or a 1.6-gallon flush depending which button you press. Naturally, we employed the 1.6-gallon option to give the test the maximum possible chance of working.
This is comparable to the kind of water pressure available to the unnamed and unidentified US interrogators at Guantanamo Bay who might theoretically have wished to flush a Quran down a toilet. Assuming the US military base there is in full compliance with US Federal regulations, 1.6 gallons per flush is now the standard.
It wasn't always like this, no sir. The National Plumbing Standards passed by Congress in 1992 as part of the Energy Policy Act marked a turning point for U.S. manufacturers of toilets, faucets, and showerheads. With these new standards, the days of 3.5 to 7 gallon per flush (gpf) toilets and 4 to 12 gallon per minute (gpm) showerheads were numbered. Now 1.6 gpf is the norm. And boy don't people enjoy complaining about it.
I have no information as to whether the toilets at Camp Delta are pre-1992 or not, and I have to admit that this crucial scientific information could have a dramatic effect on the results if this experiment. If anyone who has served with the Windward Division would care to contact us here at the Silent Running Center for Scientific Journalistic Research and let us know just how powerful the toilets there are, we will be sure to include this in a footnote to the article in "Science" which must they must surely ask us to write following the publication of this ground breaking research.
INSERTION OF BOOK
After donning protective gear and ensuring all non-essential personnel had been evacuated to a safe distance, the book was carefully placed in the toilet, preparatory to initiating the attempt to flush it.
A degree of downward force had to be employed to get the book to remain upright in what we felt was the position of maximum flushability. The book remained upright in a somewhat "curled around" position. It was felt that laying a book flat would simply make flushing it a geometric impossibility.
THE FLUSH!
The actual flush itself would be best described as anti-climactic. Despite repeated attempts at flushing, utilising the full 1.6 gallon force of the entire tank, and despite the book being curled up to it's minimum size, the only result was that it got rather damp. No movement of the book into the pipe was observed, and after ten flushes the experiment was abandoned.
The conclusion is inescapable. You cannot flush a copy of the Quran down a toilet. We hereby declare this myth officially busted!
It's a pity Newsweek didn't think of this before launching into print and causing so many actual, non-humour-related, deaths of real human people.
Coming up tomorrow - Chomsky in a blender!
shadenfreud ping.
BWAHAHAHAHAHA!
Outstanding!
Michael Moore: Hamas' best 'American' friend.
I think it all depends on the definition of toilet. Perhaps these Afghani's do not know what a toilet looks like. Maybe it's a hole in the ground. A wooden shed.
Who knows.
ping
LOL!!!!!!!
Now excuse me while I clean the adult beverage off my monitor
Still ROTFLMAO
I have to know one thing, does the water swirl to the right or to the left? How does it swirl in Iraq as compared to your location on the planet earth?
You know science is a exacting thing, a simple issue like this could change the whole experiment so everyone everywhere go out and flush your least favorite book of similar size and report your results. By the way, what was the control for this experiment - a coffee table size MM book?
It was a Hallmark moment for me. An adult beverage, A Clinton Book, A table saw, and a hungry toilet.
Life is good :-)
See Post #11
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA
THANKS for the ping!!!!
hehe! :)
LOL !
LOL
No self-respecting toilet, Australian or otherwise, would permit being abused in such an ill manner...
Does your Maid ever clean your bathroom?
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