Word: john
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...World Toilet Organization to raise awareness for the 2.5 billion people around the world who live without proper sanitation. But even for those of us with access to modern plumbing, how often do we really think about our toilets? From outhouses to water closets - even former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain's $35,000 "commode on legs" (technically a table, not a toilet) - humans have been devising creative ways to go to the bathroom since, well, the first person crossed his legs with an urgent need to go. (See the top 10 environmental ideas...
...England lept into modern sanitation when Sir John Harrington, godson of Elizabeth I, published Metamorphosis of Ajax, in which he described a new kind of water closet: a raised cistern with a small pipe down which water ran when released by a valve. The Queen installed Harrington's invention in her palace at Richmond, but it took another 200 years before a man named Alexander Cummings developed the S-shaped pipe underneath the basin to keep out foul odors. At the end of the 18th century, the flushable toilet went mainstream...
...always right. Overachieving nerds that we are, this may seem like sacrilege, but it is in this that the program finds its unique value. “You have to learn if what you’re reading in books pans out,” says Professor John Mugane, director of the African Language Program...
...wide range of viewpoints. “What we offer is a team of perspectives in this department to our students,” says Higginbotham, using a group of students working with Haitian Creole diabetes patients as an example. “They have to work with John Mugane’s African Language Program because they have to get the Haitian Creole under their belt; they have to work with an anthropologist so that they can get the ethnographic skills; and they have to get a cultural or historical perspective just to understand what are the conditions...
There is a less controversial precedent for such a project. Fifty years ago, John Howard Griffin, a white journalist, darkened his skin with pigment-changing pills and traveled through the Deep South as a black man, chronicling his experiences in the classic American novel Black Like Me. The American author and journalist Grace Halsell embarked on a similar journey in the late 1960s and wrote the novel Soul Sister, which was also highly acclaimed. Wallraff, who came across both books after he started shooting Black on White, says he has wanted to make this kind of film for years...