A Tale of Two Shitties

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Remember the early days of Covid when people got into fistfights over toilet paper? I admit, I was concerned about not having an adequate supply of asswipe. You know those stories about middle-aged dudes spending a lot of time in the bathroom? That.

Historically, shitting was not fun. You may ask Is shitting fun now? I say yes. Comparatively speaking, shitting is fun now. Toilets that take the foul substance far far away, sphincter-sparing toilet paper and bidets with built-in laser-targeting, locks on the door, and even a phone in your hand to keep you entertained while those “suicide” chicken wings wind their way southward. You’re reading this while taking a dump, aren’t you?

Hell, now we even have medications to soften if it’s too stiff or harden if it sounds like you’re doing a Neil Peart-inspired drum solo, spray-painting the inside of the bowl.

In troglodyte times, if you needed to leave the cave in the middle of the night to pinch one off you risked having some saber-toothed murder beast sauntering by your squat spot and thinking fuck yeah biped testicles are my favorite and taking a big bite outa your ass. Things marginally improved in subsequent centuries, but not a lot. Shitting still killed motherfuckers.

In writing stories for On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down, which is more about metaphorical shit going down, there were still plenty of instances where I learned of a historical figure who had died from shitting themselves to death, aka dysentery. Plenty of English Kings did, including Henry V and that asshole who brought about Magna Carta. Not saying Magna Carta was bad, just that the king at the time was an asshole and he died with a very sore asshole. Explorers and philosophers and Roman emperors all fell victim to death by pooping. And countless millions more died from cholera, another form of the literal death shits.

But there are worse ways to die than from shitting. You can die from someone else’s shitting, many someones. I speak of the Erfurt latrine disaster.

The year was 1184, a time when, if I didn’t already make clear, pooping was something of an ordeal. And so was the disposing of it, as they did not yet have the fancy sewage processing systems of our modern “ew gross get that shit far away from me” world.

This story involves people drowning in shit, but there is an upside: They were nobility. I have no desire to actually eat the rich, but seeing them choke to death on liquid poo might just be acceptable.

On July 26, 1184, there was a meeting of said aristocracy with King Henry VI of Germany in the Petersburg Citadel in the city of Erfurt. If you want some additional non-excremental context, at the time the King of Germany was making war upon Poland, and on his way toward making said war he stopped in Erfurt, which is in central Germany. Local nobles were pissed about some petty bullshit feud between two rival rich fucks over who owned some section of dirt. One was an Archbishop and the other a Landgrave and they were both wah fucking wah to the King asking him to please mediate this shit.

And so he did, asking a bunch of other noble types to attend the meeting. History would prove RSVPing for such an event most regrettable.

Not only did the time period lack in advanced methods of taking anal evacuations to a faraway place for treatment, it also seemed to have a dearth of decent builders, at least for the citadel in question. The assembled attendees gathered on the second floor, a floor that was insufficient to the task of holding their combined weight. The floor collapsed, and they fell through that, then through the ground floor, and into the latrine cesspool below.

At least sixty of them drowned in liquid shit. Henry was not one of the victims, narrowly escaping death and living another 13 years, dying at the ripe old age of 31 from some disease or another that apparently was not dysentery but could probably be cured pretty easily nowadays.

Medieval nobility were … not nice, but I believe I can muster just a bit of sympathy. Because ew.

So that happened. But I said this was a tale of two shitties. For shits and giggles, let’s add another shitty tale to wrap things up. Enter: Dave Matthews Band.

You may refer to them as shitty music if you like, but I save my musical ire for Nickelback. I hated them long before it was cool, living in a city not far from the small town where Chad and Co. were excreted into existence so that the local radio stations play them all the fucking time.

Where was I? Oh, yeah. Dave Matthews. And poop.

Hey I need money to write this shit so maybe you should

It was August 8, 2004, and the sightseers on the riverboat Chicago’s Little Lady were about to have a very bad day, although perhaps not as bad as attending a Dave Matthews concert. Okay, just one dig at their music.

I’ve been to Chicago a couple of times; it’s a city known for its impressive architecture. And other folks are like fuck yeah cool buildings, so in the summer they like to pile into boats with open-roof seating and point and say shit like “ooh” and “ah.”

Before long it would change to “AHHH WHAT THE FUCKING FUCK FUCKING SHIT THAT’S FUCKING SHIT!”

See, Dave and the band were performing in Chicago, and tour bus driver Stefan Wohl was driving their bus across the Kinzie Street Bridge. While on the bridge Stefan decided you know what I’ll just push this button here—or however it works on those fancy tour buses—and release all the “blackwater” in the holding tank. It wasn’t as shitty as when the American private military contractor named Blackwater murdered a bunch of civilians in Baghdad in 2007, but it was still pretty shitty. Literally shitty, because “blackwater” is a euphemism for, you guessed it, poop.

The bridge was grated. Stefan was like yeah we’ll just let all this shit water flow through the grates and into the Chicago River and no one will notice.

The people on the boat below the bridge noticed.

Imagine the chaos. You’re cruising along the river on a nice summer day looking at some fancy architecture and then 55 gallons of watery Dave Matthews shit lands right on your face. Actually, it was Boyd Tinsley shit, the band’s violinist. But still, gross. I don’t care whose shit it is. It could be Victoria’s Secret model shit that crashed into me and I’d still find it unpleasant.

Perhaps you believe me hyperbolic as to the pandemonium that resulted. Nope. I mean, no one died, as was the case with Erfurt, but there were 120 people on the boat, and the violinist-for-Dave shitwater hit about 80 of them. The word used to describe what resulted was “soaked.”

Soaked. Soaked in shitwater. It got into their eyes and their mouths. People began to blow chunks.

The boat returned to dock and gave everyone a refund then the deckhands swabbed up the shit off the literal poop deck and said yeah there’s no reason we need to cancel our 3pm sailing and off they went with another tour group who I expect had a far more pleasant afternoon.

The police investigated and the band was all not our tour bus but they had video that proved yeah it was your fucking tour bus and there were some fines and community service for the driver but that was basically it.

Near as I can tell, the victims of the Dave Matthews Band Worst Release Party Ever got nothing more than a refund from the tour company. I’d have sued the Grammy-winning soft rocker back to the fucking Stone Age.

Speaking of shit going down, get my sweary fucking history book ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY SH!T WENT DOWN