The Thunder Mug Family: Fun With Classifications

Jae over at the always refreshing site, Genuine Ideas, recently posted a funny writeup of the Thunder Mug fiasco, complete with this wonderful photograph of a state-of-the-art Thunder Mug: Now, clearly, as one can see from the broader Rhetorical Situation in which the Thunder Mug is placed, what we have here is not a public stall, but a private space where one can attend to one's, well, toiletries. Nevertheless, at the heart of the Larry Craig Show is the basic truth that when one enters a stall, even in a public bathroom, one partakes of a social contract whereby privacy is ostensibly guaranteed.


Harrogate, meanwhile--nothing if not willing to rise to a good challenge--here responds with a High Art Urinal he found somewhere in cyberspace. This Rodin-like piece clearly conveys the idea of a urinary space that is public; and, while conceding the Rhetorical Truth that Urinals represent a somewhat different concept from the full-on Toilet Proper, it still belongs to what we ought, in all intellectual honesty, to refer to as the Thunder Mug Family (what would the Latin Phraesology be for such a thing, Harrogate wonders?)