Wow, we're aready halfway to our toiletry goals!

Donor one:	"I can contribute $17k towards new toilets, BECAUSE I LOVE DEFECATING!"
Me:	"You are now the King Shit of Poop Mountain!"
Donor two:	"I'll sponsor one toilet, but can I have it named after me?"
Me:	"Yes, but now we just need sponsors for the other 7."
Donor two:	"Also I would like everyone to whisper my name every time they pee."

You know you want in on this, too. Let's see what you can squeeze out.

Also, tune in right now for the fifth annual DNA Lounge Yule Log webcast, 24 hours of fire and music, from 9pm on Christmas Eve to 9pm on Christmas. Come warm yourself by our fire:

We know you have many Yule Log video options in this holiday season, and we thank you for choosing ours.

Let's get this blog back on track toward its core competency: bitching about plumbing. You're not here to read about grant audits or music licensing or lawsuits or ovens, you're here to read about toilets.

Oh, the toilets. You hate 'em, we hate 'em.

The following is not an urgent need, but a long-term, persistent, nagging need. One of the things that I sometimes do when asking for donations is identifying large, self-contained projects with a non-open-ended price tag. This approach has worked out well for us several times in the past! (It got us a new dance floor!)

So lemme tell you about toilets. Maybe this will make you want to pay for a slight remodel of our bathrooms.

The problem:

We keep having leaks, which results in the floor getting gross, and stalls being taken out of commission for days until we can get a plumber in to deal with it. The plumber's fixes are all now stopgap measures that don't hold for long. Something has to give.

Background:

As you know, the toilets on the Main Room side of the compound are stainless steel prison toilets. They were very expensive, supposed to last "forever", and are also "suicide proof", "lacking crevices for hiding of contraband", and "foolproof and incapable of error".

"Forever" was overstating it. These toilets are now 23 years old, and we started having issues with some of them after about 10 years. That was not always the toilet's fault, though, but a bad design decision by our plumber back in 2001!

Ok, so, a normal toilet sits on the floor, bolted atop the wax donut on top of the drain hole, and water enters from an external pipe. For a home toilet that's flex tubing that enters the bottom of the tank; for a commercial toilet, that's usually a pipe entering from the top.

The toilets we have are weird in two ways. First, the water enters from the back, hidden behind the toilet itself. (I imagine that hiding the pipe was part of the "suicide-proofing".) Second, the position of the drain is non-standard compared to every other toilet in the world.

Water entering at the back means that these toilets need to be bolted to both the floor and the wall. Which is fine when the floor and the wall are at right angles. Which they once were! But our hundred year old building is sitting on top of sand dunes and the burned out wreckage of the wooden row houses that were here before the 1906 earthquake. Things have shifted, and sometimes we lose seal against the drain, which not only causes leaks but also causes internal corrosion. Flush and repeat.

The standard "rough-in distance" (distance from the wall to the center of the drain) is 12", but our drains are 3" to 4", some with weird custom adapters. It's a hack job.

And here's the super frustrating part about that: it didn't have to be this way! These stainless steel toilets are all bespoke. There's not a warehouse full of them somewhere, they are all made to order. They will absolutely put together a stainless toilet for you that has a standard 12" rough-in, top water entry, and even a toilet seat. But our plumber didn't do that.

This is far from the first time I have suspected that the plumber we had in 2001 was deliberately sabotaging us.

At this point you might think, "Fuck dem toilets, just replace them with porcelain toilets as they fail." Sure! Except... because both the the drain and the water feed are in a non-standard spot, replacing even one toilet means tearing open the wall to move the water pipe; jackhammering up the floor to move the drain; pouring new concrete; and re-tiling everything. Now multiply that by 8.

However, that's the right move! The nonstandard plumbing is the biggest problem. So the right solution to this problem is:

1. Convert all of the plumbing to a standard layout, so that it is even possible to plop a $300 porcelain toilet on top.

2. Then decide what toilet to plop down:

   1. New stainless toilets, with standard plumbing, and with seats. Cost about $3,000 each, last 15-25+ years.

   2. New porcelain toilets, cost $300 each, can be destroyed by a beer bottle dropped from shoulder height.

   That decision rests on what you think the average lifespan of a porcelain toilet will be, versus how much cooler you think the stainless look is. I don't have data on lifespan. It's true that we have not lost a porcelain toilet from the Pizza or Above DNA restrooms, but there are only 4 of those and they get way less traffic than the main room. Like, probably less than 10%.

This is a project that benefits heavily from economies of scale: it's cheaper to tear up the whole floor at once, to re-tile the whole wall at once, etc. than do it one stall at a time.

So we figure that phase one of the operation, "fix the stupid plumbing configuration in all stalls", probably costs around $25k all in.

Then phase two, replace the toilets themselves, costs either $3k or $20k, depending on whether we go with 2-year porcelain, or 2-decade stainless.

So, who's in? Would you like to be the hero who makes our bathrooms ride eternal, shiny and chrome?

Today in "drowning in a sea of 'one-time expenses'" news:

Our big pizza oven has been down for three weeks now, because our repair guy has ordered the wrong replacement part three times in a row. Sooooo if you know someone local who services commercial gas ovens, please let me know...

We've still got the fried foods, and we can still make 14" pizzas one at a time in our emergency backup countertop oven, but that's slow going, and we can't do by-the-slice that way.

Fortunately it's that time of year when we have very few customers.

Oh wait, that's actually not fortunate at all in any way! November and December have been even more dire than our pessimistic predictions. Like, we only had 50 people show up for our Nightmare before Christmas sing-along last night. I really thought that one was a gimme. And our ticket sales for New Year's Eve -- traditionally the only lucrative night we have in November or December -- are currently half of what they were last year at this time. And it's the exact same party.

Hey, remember that surprise SVOG audit that is costing us over $20,000? I wonder how Lil Wayne's SVOG audit is going:

On New Year's Eve 2021, he was scheduled to perform at a concert in Coachella, California. [...] Instead, posts on Instagram suggest he partied that night at a club on Sunset Boulevard. For expenses related to the concert he never performed, Lil Wayne billed taxpayers nearly $88,000. [...]

Chris Brown spent his grant on a big paycheck -- and a big party. Of the $10 million grant Brown's company CBE Touring received, $5.1 million went to Brown personally. He also billed taxpayers nearly $80,000 for his 33rd birthday party.

The blowout, held in a luxe Los Angeles event space, featured a $3,650 LED dance floor and "atmosphere models" -- nude women in body paint -- who cost $2,100, according to expense reports and a blog post by the party planner. The bill included more than $29,000 for hookahs, bottle service, "nitrogen ice cream," and damages involving burn holes to rented couches.

While the grant was meant to support live entertainment, Brown also charged $24,000 to the grant for the cost of driving his tour bus from the US to Tulum, Mexico, and back in fall 2020 during a monthlong stay for him and his entourage in the resort town, where he did not perform. [...]

DJ Marshmello received a $9.9 million grant. [...] When the SBA asked for proof of where it went, his business manager responded by saying all the money went into Marshmello's pocket. [...] He paid himself more than any other musician who received grant money. [...]

The SBA said "some" of the grants Business Insider mentioned in its reporting "remain open due to ongoing third-party audits that the Agency is resolving."

I can in full confidence make this pledge to you: absolutely none of the money that you donate to DNA Lounge will be spent on taking my entourage to Tulum.