Article: Sen. Graig Provides Laughs and Insights for the "Put the Seat Down" Crowd

Not only has Idaho Senator Larry Craig provided the Republicans with a bowlful of angst, and tanked his political career, but his laugh-filled antics and subsequent arrest in a Minneapolis airport men's room, have also flushed out what those secret bastions of for-men-only porcelain thrones and standing-room-only facilities look like.

This hidden place of male domination has always been the object of feminine curiosity. What's in there? we wonder. Are urinals really as disgusting as we're told?

In the realm of "what's shakin', baby," does the size of urinals determine how many drips are dripped? Of course, that doesn't account for the mystery of the ages -- the driblets on the ceiling -- unless they a part of a grand "aim high" game. If they are, what's the prize?

Are there newspaper racks in all the stalls?, because we've heard that the porcelain palace is one big reading room, or are they places to stall going back to work?

Letting us women in on the water closeted secrets of men began immediately. Television, being a visual medium, even though they often take the stance of "any picture is better than no picture," therefore boring our eyes with inane video tape of empty parking lots after the crime occurred.

"You want us to go where to shoot what?" was very possibly echoed throughout every TV station by innumerable camera crews. Or, they got smart and shot one video tape and threw it into the cesspool of coverage.

Except for Keith Olbermann. His crew must have said "you want us to go where, to put on costumes and HORRORS! including 'real' brogues (our feet are killing us at the very thought and we want hazard pay), to film what?"

For this bit of comedy news, K.O. dumped Puppet Theatre in favor of a "Dragnet" rip-off using the verbatim police report for the dialogue. Definitely one for his year-end "best of..."

Even my favorite morning radio guy, Doug McIntyre at KABC Radio, couldn't leave this one alone, but then he's a recovering comedy writer. It's hard to repaper your thinking when the pols manage to provide us with so much comedy relief in the midst of all their bone-headed moves while serious matters go unattended.

Accompanied by his sidekick, newsman Rob Marinko, McIntyre barged into the station's mens room to flush out anything untoward going on in there.

Standing there for two segments, all they managed to do was chase away a few of the facility's customers, and get some criticism from me and
the traffic guy, Capt'n Jorge. We took it upon ourselves to advise him to expect the water police to arrest him and put him in a stall of a different kind if he didn't stop flushing for sake of getting effective sound effects.

By the next morning he must have gotten out the handy-dandy tape recorder, because he was at it again with the flushing and Craig jokes.

Probably seeing more than our curiosity wanted to know, women are no curious about how that other half of us lives. Thanks to Craig, we will no longer wonder what men's rooms look like; it's all been flushed down and out in the swirl of media coverage.