I have a friend who was called back into the Army after being out for over 5 years. Now he's a Major, schlepping around Iraq somewhere doing who knows what. Anyway, he sent out this blurb recently:
I sleep in one of Saddam's huge palaces, and it is a fancy place. I promise to take pictures before I leave. No A/C, so I sleep at around 130's degree temperatures in a marble lined room on the 2nd floor. We have electricity, therefore fans. Yaay! And just yesterday, we leapt into the 18th century, and got... running water! With any luck, porta-potties will no longer be a daily trial. There are plans to install A/C, but I suspect that they will get installed well after they are needed as summer passes to fall passes to winter. Showers are getting harder to come by (no, now showers in the palace, believe it or not), and so is dinner for us night folks.Man, you'd think that if you're going to spend a billion dollars on a palace that you would install some frikkin' air conditioning and showers! LOSER!
I'm reminded of the following passage from Ulysses:
— What was their civilisation? Vast, I allow: but vile. Cloacae:
sewers. The
jews in the wilderness and on the mountaintop said: It is meet to be
here.
Let us build an altar to Jehovah. The Roman, like the Englishman who
follows in his footsteps, brought to every new shore on which he set his
foot
(on our shore he never set it) only his cloacal obsession. He gazed about
him in his toga and he said: It is meet to be here. Let us construct
a
watercloset.
