Razors and Renovations

It started as a leak in the toilet drain.

I hadn't done any plumbing since we bought our house and was eager to try my hand at it. The toilet job seemed pretty simple: There was a cast iron pipe leading out of the bottom of the toilet. About a foot below, in the crawl space under the house, the pipe took a 90-degree turn and headed off into oblivion. The leak was above the 90-degree turn, but below the toilet. Replace that section of pipe, and you're home free.

On Friday afternoon I visited the locally-owned plumbing supply store, told the salesman about my project, and bought the things that I needed. I had planned on replacing the piece of pipe from the floor to just past that 90-degree turn, using PVC instead of cast iron. This required taking the toilet up off the floor, as well as a handy little piece for making an easy transition from the PVC to the cast iron. I thought I'd just saw through the cast iron pipe with a hack-saw.

I spent about 30 minutes making a 1/8th inch dent in the 4 inch pipe before I went looking for another tool. (One thing I have learned, from the home improvement work I have done, is that there is nothing worse than working without the right tools.) I saved 60 bucks when, at Home Depot preparing to buy a "Sawz-All", I ran into an acquaintance of mine who owned one. That made short (45 more minutes) work of the cast iron pipe, and I was on my way.

After the section of pipe was removed, and as I was preparing the floor for the new flange upon which the toilet would sit, my wife made a suggestion, and our project took a 90-degree turn.

"Wouldn't it make sense, while the toilet is off the floor, to put the tile in?"

We had been discussing a bathroom renovation project for some time, which involved tiling the floor and tub enclosure, replacing the vinyl chair rail, installing a new vanity and toilet, and giving the room a paint job. Truthfully, it was the guest bathroom that was in direst need of the overhaul. This question is how it began.

So if we are going to install tile, we need to go ahead and get a new vanity, and so a new toilet. And of course the wainscoting we had discussed, and the paint, and why not get the shower curtain while we're at it? After all, it's on sale.

Our new vanity stands up on legs. It's finish is Dark Espresso. The white ceramic counter top sits on top and overlaps each side, as well as the front, which extends out in the rounded shape of the basin. Very nice to look at, and the contoured counter top saves a few inches in the already tight space.

Our old vanity was the cheapest one at the store. It was white coated particle board. It sat on the floor. The counter top was a hazy pink pearl, the basin in the shape of a seashell.

Since the old vanity sat on the floor, it was alright that the pipes came up through the bottom. This wasted a significant amount of cabinet space, but wasn't unsightly (setting aside the pink pearl seashell). Because our new vanity stands up on legs, pipes through the floor are unacceptable.

I should mention here that we didn't think about the pipe issue until we had demolished the old ugly vanity. This was my first headache, because it meant moving all of the pipes back into the wall. My second headache came shortly afterward, when, upon examining the situation from below (in the crawl space that is, not laying with my head to the floor), I realized that a large beam ran the length of the wall just below the area through which our new pipe assembly must pass.

As we pulled away the wall board in the area behind the old vanity, we found our first piece of human history in the house. When we had moved in I had scoured the attic and crawl space for signs of those who had come before us. Living in an old house appeals to me partially because I feel a curiosity about and a personal connection to the events that have been happening here for the last century. I always hoped to find something significant: a picture or a letter, something human.

What we found was not a letter or a picture, but was somehow more human than either. Apparently, old medicine cabinets were fitted with a slot at the back or the side, specially designed for your used safety razor blades. In the crawl space I had found an old medicine cabinet, broken severely, and had paid little attention to it accept to avoid cutting myself on the glass. What we found in the wall were the razors. Hundreds of Gillette flat safety razors poured out of a gap between wall joists. My wife put on some gloves and began picking them up to throw them away, and I thought perhaps this was human history. This was evidence of time spent, the beginnings of days, for days and weeks on end.

This bit of plumbing required a little ingenuity. for each pipe (there are three, two small pipes bringing hot and cold water into the house, and one larger pipe through which water drains) I bought two 90-degree fittings and two 45-degree fittings. I also bought a length of 1-1/2 inch PVC (for the drain) and a length of 1/2-inch CPVC (for the hot and cold spigot). (CPVC differs from PVC in that it is made to withstand the heat of the hot-water tap. The plumbers who had come before me, wherever they may now be, had used CPVC for both the hot and water taps.)

Then I set to work. Instead of sending the pipes straight up through the middle of the beam, which would have required a great deal of drilling and I feared would compromise the house's stability, I used a 90-degree fitting to turn each pipe straight up (I was starting with pipes running parallel to the floor), then a 45-degree fitting to angle them back toward the beam and the area inside the wall above. I ran them through a hole into the room, and then used my other 45-degree angle to re-straighten them. The last 90-degree fitting turns the pipes out into the room, now from within the wall, instead of out of the floor.

I did this for two of the three pipes (the drain pipe and the hot water tap). The only shut-off valve under our house does not turn off the cold water in the front half of the house. We've called a plumber to put in a valve, because I couldn't find the shut-off at the street. I also completed the original project: repairing the leaky toilet.

Next, we repair the walls and prepare the floor for tile.

John the Baptist Lumberjack

I have been interested in Early Christianity for some time. Having been raised in the Christian tradition, and eventually coming to question it, I had some vague understanding of the process, more political than prophesied, by which the New Testament, and our current form of Christianity, came into being. It was always a topic of interest to me, as I found myself particularly annoyed and frustrated by those Christians who take the Bible as literal truth, without considering the long and convoluted process by which we have been granted access to the Book. I understood that translation was an issue, as well as the many times that the Bible had to be recopied by hand before it was collected and finalized. Both of these certainly led to errors, as well as omissions and additions by those very scribes doing the copying and translating, who were not likely without their own ideas and interpretations.

Until recently, though, my understanding of the topic came from what I had heard and the conclusions I had myself come to. I just picked up a book on the subject. Bart D. Ehrman's Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scriptures and the Faiths We Never Knew is an examination of some of the earliest forms of Christianity, occurring throughout the region in the years before the New Testament was collected and one form of the religion, the form we are all familiar with, won out over all the others.

The book so far is wonderful. Ehrman, a New Testament scholar and chairman of the Department of Religious Studies at UNC Chapel Hill, uses myriad primary source material, translated by him from the original (ancient Greek, Coptic, Aramaic) to support his understandings of some of the earliest forms of Christianity. Only one of these groups (Ehrman refers to them as proto-Orthodox) comes out of the early centuries CE in one piece. The rest of them, and they are many and varied, were "lost," only to be rediscovered in previously unknown texts, found covered in dust in monastic libraries, or, more frequently, covered in sand in the deserts of the Middle East.

One chapter of the book is dedicated to a group of early Jewish-Christians known as the Ebionites. Ehrman makes the point of calling them Jewish-Christians, as these early followers of Jesus saw their budding religion not as something new, but as a simple extension of the Jewish faith. Jesus, of course was Jewish, and he Ebionites held that his appearance did not make null and void the teachings of the Old Testament, God's Law to his chosen people, which involved keeping the Sabbath, eating only certain things at certain times, and of course, circumcision.

You can imagine that these Ebionites may have had some trouble finding converts. How many, after all, are likely to choose a religion which not only institutes some pretty hefty rules and regulations, but also requires a painful and sensitive surgical procedure? Most of the Ebionites were likely already Jewish, and it is not surprising that this form of Christianity didn't catch on as the religion of the masses. As Ehrman puts it:

Had Ebionite Christianity "won" the internal battles for dominance, Christianity itself would probably have ended up as a footnote in the history of religion books used in university courses in the West. (p. 110)

This, however, is not the most interesting aspect of this ancient Christian sect, nor have I yet come to the reason for this post. You see, the Ebionites, according to Ehrman, seemed to have given up the sacrifice of animals, considering Jesus' death on the cross to have been the ultimate sacrifice and thus making any further sacrifice unnecessary. This also lead them to strict vegetarianism, considering any killing of animals as an unnecessary sacrifice. This also led to some interesting developments in their holy book, which Ehrman refers to as the Gospel of the Ebionites:

Probably the most interesting of the changes from the familiar New Testament accounts of Jesus comes in the Gospel of the Ebionites description of John the Baptist, who, evidently, like his successor Jesus, maintained a strictly vegetarian cuisine. In this Gospel, with the change of just one letter of the relevant Greek word, the diet of John the Baptist was said to have consisted not of locusts [meat!] and wild honey (cf. Mark 1:6) but of pancakes and wild honey. (pp. 102-103)

Pancakes! Ha!! I had always pictured John the Baptist as a grizzly, poorly-groomed bear of a man, coming out of the woods like a beast with visions and premonitions of some looming event. He had seemed to me like the first sidewalk caller, unwashed and unfed yelling out the prophetic words of God to anyone who would listen. But reading this put a whole new spin on this image.

I laughed out loud as I imagined John the Baptist coming out of the woods, famished, donning a soiled red flannel shirt, jeans, suspenders and boots, sitting down at the first table he could find to a steaming hot pile of flapjacks and honey as tall as they could be stacked. This seemed to me something that might turn up in a Cohen Brothers "loose adaptation" of the Gospel according to Mark. John the Baptist Lumberjack!

Further, somewhat cursory, research outside Ehrman leads me to the feeling that the Ebionite interpretation may in fact be more accurate. The word in question, which according to Ehrman needs but one letter changed, is the Greek word for locusts, akris. The Ebionites changed this word to egkris, or pancakes made of ground coriander seed. Paula Gott, an Essene Nazarene minister, sites earlier references to this same food, found in the Old Testament descriptions of the Jews' 40 years in the wilderness (Numbers 11:7-8, Exodus 16:31-32). It seems appropriate that in a New Testament Gospel like Matthew, which is decidedly pro-Jewish (Ehrman 98), parallels would be drawn between John the Baptist's wanderings in the wilderness and these earlier Jewish experiences there.

Whatever version is "correct," and Ehrman's book will lead many people to the conclusion that arguments over Biblical "correctness" may be moot, my own personal version of John the Baptist has been forever changed.

Thanks, Bart.

The Story Teller -- A Call to Action

In my previous post, I mentioned the proprietor of the Book Nook, who has held a dear place in my heart since high school, as both a Loud Talker, and a Story Teller.

During my research for that post, when looking for a suitable link to information about the Book Nook, I came across the following post in an online chat forum:

Barry

Marietta, GA · May 31, 2007

"Love books worked in retail books for last 20 years(was just recently fired as manager of Book Nook Marietta after 10 years).....anyway I'm mostly a non-fiction guy ,but I love fiction from John Steinbeck to Stan Lee."

Is this The Loud Talker of my youth?! Has the Story Teller been silenced? I never knew the name of The Story Teller, or if I did that has been lost. What has not been lost, what I will never lose, is the memory of The Book Nook, a memory that is inextricably linked to The Loud Talker's voice, continuously telling his stories to whomever would listen.

If this Barry is indeed The Story Teller, and it seems likely that it is (I recall that The Story Teller seemed to hold some position of authority. In my last post I called him "owner," but "manager" fits nearly as well), I feel that it is my responsibility to cast the light of inquisition on the circumstances surrounding his firing. What is The Book Nook without The Story Teller?

I am calling the readers of this blog to action regarding this horrible turn of events. This, as Barry says, is "an unexpected shock and trauma" for me and all those like me, whose memories of childhood book buying are crystallized in the image and sound of The Story Teller. Please post any pertinent information regarding Barry's firing. We will know the facts. We, like Barry, are "non-fiction guys".

Oh, Barry! You have fallen on hard times. Your stories stifled by the limitations of print and the character maximums of chat forum posting boxes. You are not forgotten, Storyteller! You talk more loudly than ever now, and what you say will resound in history!

Loud Talkers, Story Tellers, and Monster Molecules

I have fallen out of contact with too many people.

Those with whom I have maintained contact with are the most valued friends I have. I do not wonder that the value of friendship increases with time. This fact seems plain, and can be explained with simple logic: the longer you know someone, the more they know you. This is true even if, upon meeting a person, you tell them nothing about yourself before that moment. By virtue of spending regular time with the person, they know more everyday of who you "are". The argument could be made -- indeed likely has been made, and made sufficiently in my imagination for me to stand in agreement with it -- that it is impossible for someone to know anything about you before they day on which you meet. This given that any description of yourself prior to your meeting would be colored necessarily by who you "are" at that given time, and thus would not in fact be your "past," but your "current" version of that past.

I digress. I recently had a message from a friend of mine from high school. Indeed, we were best friends, and we have known each other since we were very small. Since high school, though, we have rarely talked.

His message regarded the "Monster Molecule," which, of course, is methane. He is in science now, and his masters studies bring him regularly in contact with this mother of all molecules.

Why we had termed methane the Monster Molecule escapes me, now. I do know that it was mostly nonsense, owed to our preoccupation with making Chemistry not only educational but also extremely funny and entertaining. (After learning about Johannes Brønsted's theory of acids and bases, I began writing my name with the "ø" in place of a traditional "o", figuring, simply, if Brønsted can do it, so can I. I wrote my name thus on the tops of my papers, inside chemistry and out, for the better part of the next two years. This is humor in AP Chemistry. Incidentally, my Chemistry teacher used the "ø" to sign my yearbook. She knew funny when she saw it.) We imagined methane, which has four strong covalent bonds, as some sort of molecular monster truck, coming into the chemical arena to crush all those lesser molecules in a fantastic spectacle. We even went so far, whenever mentioning the Monster Molecule, as to say it exclusively in our best "Monster Truck Rally Announcer" voice.

Gosh, those were the days, weren't they? The spirit of free creativity reigned supreme in all our endeavors.

I remember the Book Nook. This was (and still is) a used book store in the town where we grew up. Books, of course, having great importance to me, and to him as well, we spent time at the Book Nook. A bit of lore grew up between us regarding the owner of the Book Nook(or the manager, although in an establishment of this kind we assumed the two were one), who was an immense person. He was fat to the point of using a cane to get around. Not old, and not well kept, he wore t-shirts and sweat pants behind the counter where he totaled the books. He would buy back your books, if they weren't rubbish, for store credit, which you could use to buy other (though fewer) books. Whenever we would enter the store, the owner would be telling a story, thus The Story Teller, loudly enough so that everyone in the store could here him, thus the Loud Talker. He was invariably talking to someone in the store, telling them about a piece of gossip, a recent happening with regards to the business, the latest headlines, the plot of a book of interest. However, there was the sense as we perused the science fiction section, the history/cookbooks section, that he was telling us all a story. There was no music in the store, as one is used to hearing in bookstores -- classical or jazz or top 40, or jazz versions of top 40 -- just The Story Teller, The Loud Talker talking on and on, telling his story.

None of his stories do I remember. I don't remember if I cared what he was saying. Most of the time his stories had nothing to do with me. The Story Teller, though, lives on.

Once we went to the store. I think they were in the midst of relocating, to a new free-standing building down the street (which seems to me now to have formerly been some sort of restaurant). My friend and I came to look, and perhaps to buy a book. What we found were two shelves of discount books. Discount books in a used bookstore are sold at a very good price. Here we found a steal. "4 for 50¢ or 1bag for $5." We had $15 dollars between us, and left the store with upwards of 70 books.

This in itself sent us rolling. Why did we buy all these books? We hadn't even looked at the titles, but chose the ones which fit most snugly into the bags, thus more books for our buck. We left the store with only one possible reason in mind: we need to give these books away. And so we went to a Wal-Mart parking lot, emptied the bags of books into the trunk of his car, and began offering "free books" to anyone who happened by the car on their way to or from the store.

It was surprising how many people wouldn't take a book. Who doesn't want a free book?

Conventional Wisdom's Role in our National Debate

I have been reading The Assault on Reason, by Al Gore. Overall, I find this book extremely relevant and timely, as well as disturbing in its examination of the current state of affairs in our nation. Gore perceives and expresses with great clarity the danger posed to our democracy by the decline in reading, public participation, and the manufacture of consent.

In addition, I appreciate Gore's continued and insistent call to action with regards to our environment and the looming threat of global warming. His continued struggle to build support and public awareness for this issue continues in The Assault on Reason, where he describes the great lengths to which Big Business (especially Big Oil) and special interest politics go to sow seeds of misinformation with regards to global warming. The behavior of these businesses (and the executive powers which are beholden to them) is reprehensible, and must be dealt with swiftly and in the strongest possible manner. I laud Gore for his attempts to bring these issues to the forefront.

However, in the 7th chapter of his book, entitled "The Carbon Crisis," I came across the following quote:

"Our 'footprint' can now be measured not only by the impact of all the CO2 we are pumping daily into the earth's atmosphere, but also by our careless destruction of one football field's worth of forest on the surface of the planet every second of every day." (p. 202-3)

Gore continues by discussing the depletion of our fisheries and human-caused extinctions in the oceans. Both this point, and of course the Carbon point that makes up the first half of the above quote, are explored in more detail. However, the issue of deforestation is let rest with that single statement regarding its overall rate.

The "football field a second" statistic is one that I have heard before, which made me curious as to its origins. It is a stat that seems to me to ring more like conventional wisdom than established fact, much like the "every two minutes a teenager dies in a drunk driving accident" statistic that is given over and over in middle school Health classrooms. High impact, but perhaps at a substantial cost in reliability.

The book contains a notes section which delineates sources for a majority of the claims it makes. However, any reference to a source for this information is notably absent.

I did a little thought experiment with this statistic in mind. Using a number from Wikipedia for the total surface area of the earth, I attempted to see, at Gore's stated rate, how long it would take before a theoretical earth covered entirely with forests would be laid bare by man's destructive impulses. My math, which I attach below, left me a startlingly low number: 209 days.

I checked my math a couple of times in a couple of different ways. I encourage readers also to do so, and to suggest any flaws in my thought experiment that may account for this startlingly low number.

209 days. And considering that the earth's surface is nearly 71% water (this statistic also drawn from Wikipedia), the actual number could not be more than around 61 days. Considering Gore's book was published in May of this year, if the entire land mass had been covered with trees the first of which were cut down and processed to make the paper on which The Assault on Reason was published, we would currently be living on a planet devoid of forests.

This number obviously does not account for reforestation efforts (as well as any reforestation that may occur by accident), but in 209 days, let alone 61, little reforestation could occur.

Perhaps I'm missing something.

This is not to suggest that Gore's book is any less important in its analysis of the state of American Democracy with regards to participation "by the people." And his condemnation of the Bush administration's policy on, well, on just about everything, goes over very well with my own reactions and personal analyses. However, I think that the appearance of such conventional wisdom, obviously intended to generally overstate the issue, in this book, which founds its argument on the importance of reason, logic, and a public supplied with reliable information, is dangerous, if not downright irresponsible.

By tossing around conventional wisdom amidst well-founded scientific fact, Gore runs the risk of depleting his own authority on an issue to which he has dedicated his career, as well as a significant portion of his conscience.

Conventional wisdom in this sense is little more or less than the "gut reaction" of the masses. It is the stuff of conversations over tea, of email forwards. And we know all to well what happens when one acts on an uninformed "gut feeling" in affairs of global importance. Malcolm Gladwell examines the "gut" in his book Blink, and also discussed Bush's insistence on using his "gut" in an interview on The Colbert Report. By relying on anecdotal statistics, the stuff of email forwards and urban legends, Gore runs the risk of landing himself in the same camp.

This is one incident in a book that I otherwise find well-grounded in empirical knowledge, I will not right Gore off for a slip that may or may not have been intentional. I hope, however, that he heeds his own warnings with regards to bent facts and misleading statistics. These tactics are not his strength, which is a good thing, unless he decides to pursue them further, which will undoubtedly result in a loss of his audience to those factions which specialize in manufacturing consent.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
My Thought Experiment

Earth’s surface area = 510,065,600 km² (196,937,429 mi²)

196,937,429 mi² x 5280 ft/mi = 1,039,829,625,120 ft²

Football field dimensions = 160 ft x 360 ft (including end zones) = 57,600 ft²

Number of football fields that would fit on Earth’s surface:

1,039,829,625,120 ft² / 57,600 ft² = ~18,052,598 football fields

Number of football fields destroyed in a day:

1 per second (according to Gore and conventional wisdom)

1 field/sec x 60 sec/min x 60 min/hr x 24 hr/day = 86,400 fields/day

Area destroyed per day:

86,400 fields/day x 57,600 ft²/field = 4,976,640,000 ft²/day

Total days until total destruction:

1,039,829,625,120 ft² / 4,976,640,000 ft²/day = ~209 days

To check the answer:

~18,052,598 fields / 86,400 fields/day = ~209 days

Senator Craig and the Good Idea Gone Wrong

The coverage of Senator Larry Craig's conduct in the bathroom of the Minneapolis airport is out of control. Craig said in a public address shortly after his guilty plea had been made public that he had "made a mistake" in pleading guilty. I'll say.

Don't get me wrong. I'm a sucker for the tale of a die-hard anti-homosexual's lusty and scandalous public outing. However, I'm not so quick to decide that this is what Senator Craig's situation ultimately boils down to. I'm much more inclined to believe him. He made a mistake, or more probably a few mistakes, and it is likely now to cost him his career. In my mind, he is not yet a seedy sex-villian set on exploiting public restrooms for sordid sexual encounters. What he is, certainly, is a dope. A huge dope.

First of all, Craig didn't have an attorney present. In fact, it seems -- from the police report and plea document, as well as by his own admission --that he neglected to consult with anyone before signing his name to a document which found him responsible for two misdemeanors. Now, I'm no lawyer, and I disagree with suggestion, put forward by one cable news anchor, that because Craig is a lawmaker he should automatically understand every aspect of the law. In my opinion, one of the problems with the lawmakers in this country is that their are too many lawyers among them. (See The World is Flat for a novel idea -- that those who make policy should be none other than those who have experience and expertise in the field for which they make policy, i.e., scientists, health care workers, educators, etc.) However, I do know some lawyers, and I'll bet Larry Craig knows a few hundred more than I. And yet, he didn't call one.

What a dope.

His refusal before the fact to consult with anyone may speak to Senator Craig's guilt. His guilty plea certainly does. More than that, however, it speaks precisely to a point which he himself made. He wanted it all to go away. If this had been a traffic ticket, he likely would have been right. In fact, if these same charges were brought against him in some other context, he may very well have been right. A disorderly conduct and interference with privacy charge may very well have disappeared without a sound (and certainly with less of a sound) if Senator Craig had, say, had one too many drinks at the hotel bar, lumbered up the hallway singing "Hail to the Chief" and accidentally walked into the wrong suite.

The idea was good. The arresting officer made it clear enough. "I don't want to take you to jail." If you cooperate, you can go home. Sign the paper, pay the fine, get on with my life. It may in fact be a good indicator that Craig intended to do nothing wrong that he plead guilty without a fight. He misunderstood the charge, or underestimated its impact, and for that he is sorry.

I don't know that this would be less of a story, sadly, had he brought his lawyers into it. He would not be under fire for his "secrecy," but some other aspect of the story would surely take the reigns.

On a related note, I, for one, am now utterly frightened of public restrooms. And not remotely so for fear of potential Larry Craigs waiting in the stall next to mine to tap their feet and touch the stall partition. I'm afraid of arrest. Using a public restroom has always been a self-conscious event, especially when sitting on the toilet is involved. I am worried that my unavoidable fidgets and sideways glances might be misconstrued by some plainclothes cop in the next stall for a come-on.

This reminds me of a middle school insecurity and a flash game I once played. (This was years ago. I played flash games before flash games were the thing.) In middle school, if my experience can be generalized to any degree, using the rest room involved some level of ritual in and of itself. Doing a number 2 meant going to the very last stall. This was the only stall with a door on it. If I, in the midst of a doorless crap, had caught the baby blues of some other unfortunate irregular, I would have been devastated. Humiliated, even. However, I would hardly have cause to accuse the young man of interference of privacy. Much less imply that he was "cruising." (When my mom was young, "cruising" was what you did on a Friday night. Down to the movies, up to the BurgerSpot, over to the Five'n'Dime.)

Number 2 in middle school also often meant waiting an inordinate amount of time. This, however, for reasons diametrically opposite to those of "cruisers." You see, if you could hold it long enough and be very quiet, you could be absolutely certain that there was no one in the restroom, no one outside the restroom, no one in the hallway who might catch a whiff and wander in, just to poke fun at you.

The flash game, which incidentally still exists and can be found in an updated version here, suggests theoretical situations you may encounter upon entering a restroom. With 6 urinals in all, variously occupied by other gentlemen, you are to choose your urinal based on a notion of restroom etiquette and assumed male homophobia and sexual uncomfortableness. If you choose a stall too near another guy, you lose. (If you choose one too far away, you look like a homophobe, and thus, implicitly, a closet homosexual).

I was reminded of this game by an implication of the arresting officer that Craig waited specifically for this certain toilet to open up. By the time the Senator had dropped trou and sat down, it seems, he was already under suspicion. A tap of the foot, a wave of the hand, and he was under arrest. It seems to me that this sort of sting, in which vague gestures and foot motions are taken for explicit language and intent, borders on thought crime.

I can imagine a situation, and this may be one, where someone innocently made moves that unfortunately had been set aside in someone's book as code. The men's room has its own mysterious culture, and, just as nodding for a refill in Sri Lanka will get you none, tapping your foot in the toilet will get you fellatio.

Or get you arrested.

Maybe not a homosexual. Maybe not a "cruiser." But what a dope...