Östra Ölands Fria Horisont

Kurt Lundgren is a journalist and writer who is keeping a blog Östra Ölands Fria Horisont (East Ölands Free Horizon). He is very free thinking, dislikes injusticies, churches and dogmas (not religion per se) and green muppets (hence the name of his blog. He hates the useless wind turbine park they have built where he lives).

His blog is entierly written in Swedish- sometimes with a somewhat... Hmm, "strong" language. He is very funny and I will now try to translate an excerpt of one of his latest posts.

Ode to the outhouse and an environmental warning.

A scientist at the college in my small town has got 1 million crowns in a grant to research possible alternatives to the water closet. Well there is an area where I'm an expert as in so many other fields. The alternative to a water closet is an outhouse! So give me the million.

Every summer for 30 years I sat in an outhous [doing buissness], it was placed so that I could sit there with the door open looking out over a meadow looking at the bumblebees and bees flying around. The nightingale sang in the bushes and if I were lucky I could lay my eyes on a couple of deers a fox or a badger sneaking by.

You got both physical and pshycological harmony sitting in this old and crooked privy that my father had built with love.

It did not smell bad either. We bought a big bag of bark of wich you threw in the hole afterwards, it was practically odourless.

[...]

You should not experiment to much- An outhouse will do just fine.

Now for a true story.

A family [near by] were renovating their old house. They wanted to be environmental friendly so they installed a big plastic tank under the house, piss went in to one of the halfs, and shit to the other and then it was supposed to be emptied somehow, I don't know how, but it was supposed to be very good for the invironment it was said.

Then the winter came with temperatures of -20c or less several days in a row as can happen at our latidudes. A killer winter, the toilet swammed over, the whole house were permeated with the fumes, it was like powerful forces was trying to get through the bathroom floor which buldged uppwards.

What had happened? Hast du mir gesehen.

Everything in the tank had frozen solid to a single 20 cubic meter large cube of piss and shit.

"It will melt during the spring", promised the entrepanure.

The hell it did! It was pure core ice. The cube was still frozen in August even though we had had an exceptionally warm summer.

The whole house was jacked up, four guys with jackhammers crawled under the house and after three days of work they had hacked upp the lump and got it transported away.

The house was thereafter sold and I don't know what happened.

And everything is true, because I've heard it right out of the horses mouth, the wife in the house.

An old honest WC or an outhouse is my game after hearing about this. No experiments with excrements!