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Voyez le musée de papier hygiénique!

museumoftoiletpaper

Uncle B is kind of a hoarder. Not the pathological kind of a hoarder, thank goodness, but…let’s just say we have sufficient canned beans to qualify as Mormons in good standing.

He says he got the acquisitional bug in the Seventies, when Britain lived through a series of strikes and Soviet-Union-style goods shortages. The kind of deal where he’d call friends and say, “ZOMG, there’s sugar in the market on my corner!” and everybody would swarm over and buy them out.

This is before the Blessed Saint Margaret of Conservative Principles rode into town and started kicking socialist butt, obviously.

Anyhow. Dude is stuck on buy.

Toilet paper is a particularly desirable inventory item. Lots and lots of toilet paper. I have to admit, he goes through it at a great clip. I’m pretty sure he goes into the loo in the morning, constructs a warm, soft nest, curls up for a nap and then flushes the lot away. This scenario meets the known facts exceptionally well.

Even after we moved and I discovered the hidden Federal Reserve of TP, I couldn’t convince him enough was snuff. So I took all the rolls out of the pantry and arranged them on the handy display shelf in the back bathroom. Why the hell there’s a shelf near the ceiling of the back bathroom, it doesn’t bear thinking of, but it worked. Beholdening his great stocks of fluffy non-wovens turned off the toilet-paper-buying machinery at last.

Mostly.

So today we have this exchange:

UB: “You know, we actually need to buy more toilet paper soon.”
SW: “You just bought a twelve pack two days ago! I couldn’t fit it on the shelf.”
UB: “Oh, that doesn’t count.”

I see. It has now become a shelf-stocking exercise.

Sometimes weasels are too damn clever for their own good.

Comments


Comment from dfbaskwill
Time: March 19, 2009, 7:42 pm

And who knew David Frum was a weasel too?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Yd0Krz3q9k&feature=player_embedded


Comment from Christopher Taylor
Time: March 19, 2009, 7:47 pm

No man uses toilet paper more than a woman I swear you make a catchers mitt out of the stuff every time you go in to the bathroom.


Comment from Uncle Badger
Time: March 19, 2009, 7:58 pm

I wish it to be known that I have no responsibility for either those shelves, or the extremely gay brackets that support them.

The bog rolls, on the other hand I am not in the last ashamed of.

They pale into insignificance beside the Museum of Baked Beans or The Free World’s Exhibition of Tinned Salmon, anyway.


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: March 19, 2009, 8:07 pm

It’s one of the many ways Uncle B and I are wired backwards, Christopher. He does indeed use ten times the TP that I do.

I often joke that when we get hit by a bus and some random strangers come to clean out Badger House, we’re going to get blamed for each other’ses stuff. His flowers, my knife collection. Like that.

Oh, how we laugh.

We don’t do cosplay, though. Stop thinking that, ‘K?


Comment from Mrs. Hill
Time: March 19, 2009, 8:18 pm

Mr. Hill has always maintained that when TSHTF, TP will become the medium of exchange — that’s no museum, it’s Fort Knox!


Comment from Uncle Badger
Time: March 19, 2009, 8:24 pm

It damned nearly got that way during the early 1970s, Mrs Hill!


Comment from armybrat
Time: March 19, 2009, 9:20 pm

I just wish to put my vote for the “you can never have enough toilet paper” group. Please, I’m married to a chef and we DRINK. I don’t want to stagger to the toilet at 3am and discover there is no paper. I live in 1000 sq ft in Boston and I’m sure 20 sq ft is devoted to toilet paper reserve……as it should be.


Comment from Machinist
Time: March 20, 2009, 12:14 am

I also use far more than my wife and I also vote for the “you can never have too much” ticket.

Does it get stale?

Are you likely to stop using it?

NEST BUILDERS UNITE!!!


Comment from Machinist
Time: March 20, 2009, 12:19 am

The closet in my library has small shelves that hold about a thousand VHS cassettes, but the top shelf? Paper by the case!


Comment from porknbean
Time: March 20, 2009, 1:35 am

Uncle B, weasel stocked the shelf wrong. You are supposed to start stocking from the floor, until it hits the shelf.

The stuff on the shelf is just a capper. Dude, you’ve got some more shopping/stocking to do.


Comment from porknbean
Time: March 20, 2009, 1:39 am

I’ve got a cabinet full of incandescent light bulbs. Mostly 60 and 75 watts. Uh…huh…


Comment from Machinist
Time: March 20, 2009, 2:53 am

Very wise!


Comment from Uncle Badger
Time: March 20, 2009, 7:29 am

So much support! Badgers 1 – Weasels 0!!!

Actually, porknbean, it’s a good job her Ladyship didn’t choose to depict my prize hoard of lightbulbs – but maybe even her Stoatliness sees the sense in that one.

The UK gummint has decreed that we’ll no longer be allowed to buy them from later this year, ‘cos of, oh, hippies, or something. Already good ol’ 100 Watt incandescents are like rocking horse shit.

So guess which badger will make his fortune selling them for a fabulous price, one at a time, from the back room of a dingy pub in a few years time?

Actually, I won’t be parted from them. Might even never be able to bring myself to use one as it…. (gasp) ‘depletes the stock’.

And then there’s the corned beef, blank DVDs, batteries (oh, batteries!),soap (don’t ask), VHS cassettes (Hi, Machinist!), socks, unworn shirts…


Comment from Gnus
Time: March 20, 2009, 9:08 am

It’s always best to think ahead. Me, I’m only happy when there’s a superfluity of paper towels in the house. Viva! of course. Get away from me with yer Bounty and shit. And now they come in the thingie where you can just tear off half a sheet. Supreme design there.

And yes, gotta be sure there’s enough TP in the storeroom. When the apocalypse hits, I’m gonna be among the last to resort to corn cobs.


Comment from Gibby Haynes
Time: March 20, 2009, 11:27 am

So guess which badger will make his fortune selling them for a fabulous price, one at a time, from the back room of a dingy pub in a few years time?

You’ll be lucky. They, by which I mean the Glorious Revolutionary People’s Government, have decided that banning smoking isn’t killing the pub industry off quite as fast as they’d’ve liked, so they’ve now set their sights on alcohol.

In a few years time there will only be a few scattered museum pubs where children can be taught about how pubs used to be havens for white, heterosexual racists who used to gather to plot the oppression of ethnic minorities, objectify women and intoxicate themselves before going out to look for a rape victim.

My God – that’s a lot of bog roll. No wonder you need such a big cess tank.


Comment from Nicole
Time: March 20, 2009, 12:07 pm

Yeah, I’ve been stocking up on the lightbulbs, too.

And I too am a fan of the half sheet paper towels.


Comment from Dawn
Time: March 20, 2009, 12:42 pm

Gnus
Viva Viva!
You guys can shame me if you want, but I like flourescent lightbulbs. We have vaulted ceilings and changing a lightbulb becomes an all day and dangerous ordeal. Seven years, baby!


Comment from scubafreak
Time: March 20, 2009, 1:13 pm

And now for something completely different!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LbvP7dT3Dx0&feature=player_embedded


Comment from porknbean
Time: March 20, 2009, 1:38 pm

That there is quite entertaining, scubafreak.


Comment from Gibby Haynes
Time: March 20, 2009, 2:49 pm

Indeed it is. But not, I fear, as entertaining as TopGun…North Korean style.


Comment from Princess Bernie
Time: March 20, 2009, 3:00 pm

Stocking up on lightbulbs? I stock up on candles. And gasoline for the generator.

/going back to the basics. Especially since we’ve had an ice storm and two windstorms of epic proportions in 6 months’ time here.


Comment from Nicole
Time: March 20, 2009, 4:55 pm

Candles I already have a stock of. Gots no generator though. Do have a wood fireplace and a gas one, though.

Candles aren’t being outlawed though, at least not yet. 😛


Comment from scubafreak
Time: March 20, 2009, 5:28 pm

Well, I DO have a generator, but no fireplace. Gave my wood burning stove to my brother for his outbuilding. Got wood, though… 😉


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: March 20, 2009, 5:34 pm

I’m a Brawny kindofa gal (and not because of the odd viral commercials, either). White, heavy-duty, select-a-size. There’s a particular cottony soft one that rocks. I honestly don’t know how Rembrandt painted with out paper towels.

Of course, I had to use rolls of Brawny as packing materials in my moving boxes. The paper towels (AKA ‘kitchen roll’) here are teh sux0r.


Comment from Dawn
Time: March 20, 2009, 6:40 pm

Do you mean these viral commercials?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddcD35VjNt4


Comment from S. Weasel
Time: March 20, 2009, 7:54 pm

That’s the one! Although that particular one makes it clear they’re taking the piss. Earlier versions were…creepy and ambiguous.


Comment from MCPO Airdale
Time: March 20, 2009, 9:14 pm

“Mean Mister Badger sleeps in the park
Shaves in the dark trying to save paper
Sleeps in a hole in the road
Saving up to buy some clothes
Keeps a ten-bob note up his nose
Such a mean old man
Such a mean old man”

Mean = cheap for you Yanks


Comment from Mr. Hill
Time: March 21, 2009, 10:27 pm

His Wifey Weez’
she Photoshops
she never stops
she’s a go-getter!

Thanks MCPO! I thought he was actually mean all these years.


Comment from Christopher Taylor
Time: March 22, 2009, 9:06 pm

Mean = cheap for you Yanks

Used to mean that here too, about 150 years ago.

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