Golf Balls & Reality Teevee

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5tf7Ju9NBdk

Today, I saw a demonstration video of a toilet made by American Standard (⬆︎linked⬆︎above⬆︎). The company boasts that their Champion 4 model can flush 56 chicken nuggets effortlessly. They also advertise that it can flush 24 golf balls at once.

That’s what caught my attention – the golf balls.

Advertising toilets is much like advertising sanitary napkins or tampons – feminine hygiene products made to absorb menstrual blood flow. On teevee, they’re ALWAYS depicted as absorbing a blue liquid, which is most likely water with bluing added. Never red. Never. Perhaps the advertisers mean to suggest that if women purchase their branded products, they’ll become blue bloods.

Toilets are similarly depicted – never showing life’s reality. It’s just too… real.

So-called “reality” teevee is more surreal than real, especially when a naked man and woman are thrust together in a half-cocked scheme to “find” their way “back to” whatever version of reality from which they originated. There was a time when a naked man and naked woman put together would be finding other, better, more pleasant things to do rather than traipse across the countryside in their birthday suits.

Yet that’s what passes for “entertainment” these days. Never wonder why I’ve not owned a teevee for at least 10yrs.

But, back to the golf balls.

The American Standard Champion 4 model toilet is depicted in advertising as flushing two dozen golf balls in one flush.

That’s impressive, of course, but the thought that occurred to me was

For just one moment… forget about what Jesus would do.

Today was a good day at work.

I cried.

The last time I recollect crying at work was at least 6 or more years ago when a patient of mine – a young black male, who was his mother’s only son – had been murdered, and as I looked into her bloodshot, tired, hollow, intently peering and watery eyes, volumes were communicated though we neither said a word.

I couldn’t bear her gaze, and after what seemed ages, I averted my eyes, and departed behind a nearby curtain in the Trauma ICU to cry. There, my tears flowed like twin rivers, swollen by a storm, albeit an emotional one, which was joined by the two smaller tributaries of my nostrils. Gazing over the city from atop the 11th story of the teaching hospital through tear-drenched eyes, I wondered… was this what dear Mother Mary felt like when she gazed upon her only son as he hung from that cross?

Today, I wept for