World Toilet Day is today... and it's no joke.

"Haiti is in the throes of a cholera epidemic. The disease is easily treated, and can be prevented outright if people have access to good sanitation and purified water, health experts say. But the country, debilitated by the earthquake, poverty and hurricanes, lacks access to clean water, toilets or health care. Lack of sanitation is the leading cause of infection in the world...."

This reminds me of a passage in the truly engrossing Bill Bryson book "At Home: A Short History of Private Life," describing the sanitary conditions in England in the 19th century:

[C]esspits in poorer districts were seldom emptied and frequently overflowed... In St. Giles... 54,000 people crowded into just a few streets. By one count, 1100 people lived in 27 houses along one alley; that is more than 40 people per dwelling. In Spitalfields, farther east, inspectors found 63 people living in a single house. The house had 9 beds — one for every 7 occupants....

Such masses of humanity naturally produced enormous volumes of waste — far more than any system of cesspits could cope with. In one fairly typical report an inspector recorded visiting 2 houses in St. Giles where the cellars were filled with human waste to a depth of 3 feet. Outside the inspector continued, the yard was 6 inches deep in excrement. Bricks had been stacked like stepping-stones to let the occupants cross the yard.

At Leeds in the 1830s, a survey of the poorer districts found that many streets were "floating with sewage"; one street, housing 176 families, had not been cleaned for 15 years. In Liverpool, as many as one-sixth of the populace lived in dark cellars, where wastes could all too easily seep in.

Haiti's constitution rules out a Wyclef Jean presidency.

He's Haitian, but the constitution requires presidential candidates to have lived in the country for the past 5 years.

The musician had argued that his appointment as a roving ambassador for Haiti in 2007 exempted him from the residency requirement.

Apparently, textualism beat out fancier notions of interpretation. No "active liberty" or whatever?

Wipergate.

Hmmm.

Crying Haitians spliced with bellowing pop stars...

... heartrending outreach or charity porn?

"If you're not a doctor, step away!" "We're all doctors!"

In Haiti, too many doctors! (The quotes above occurred as 12 individuals crowded around a tiny baby.)

"It may have looked like no one was counting, but someone was supposed to."

Suddenly, Haiti is saying that it has collected and buried 150,000 bodies. How many remain in the rubble? Are any still alive? Consider that the internation rescue effort has extracted only 132 live human beings from the wreckage.

"I survived by drinking Coca-Cola."

"I drank Coca-Cola every day, and I ate some little tiny things... I was hungry, but every night I thought about the revelation that I would survive."