“Toilet Paper Panic Engulfs Taiwan”!
It happened a while ago — the Times article, above, was published late February — and while I tagged this immediately as an important topic to reflect upon, somehow I didn’t get around to it. Until today.
Why not? Well, Twitter. Which in itself I intend to get to today but maybe won’t.
So. Back to the Great Taiwanese Toilet Paper Panic. Which has not, to my eagle eye (one of my eyes is eagle, the other eh), been followed up since. A number of articles in various journals at the time but nothing since.
So what’s the deal? It’s only a guess but you can help me prove its validity right now: word ran around Taiwan that the price of toilet paper was about to go up and everybody rushed out to stock up on toilet paper creating the toilet paper shortage.
So, tell me. Does merely reading the headline about a toilet paper shortage cause you — especially you older women — to become really squirmy and to rush to the toilet, and then to the store where you overstock on toilet paper?
Because I’ll tell you, that’s precisely what that headline did for me. Think about it. Can you women imagine anything worse in this world than a toilet paper shortage? I can’t. There are two elements we require for life, and the first is water. Which is sort of…
Oh you know.
P.S. Since I’ve made a strong stand about gathering the facts of life, I followed my own advice and double-checked whether there were any follow-up stories on this news. There were not.
But when I googled “Taiwan toilet paper shortage,” what do you think the first link was? No? Can’t guess? OK: it was a link to Quilted Northern, a Georgia Pacific paper product. And who owns Georgia Pacific?
The Koch Brothers. Damn, these guys are evil.