If you read page 5 of this magazine, our dear Isa, historian and main contributor, reveals that the appearance of the daily press back in the 18th century solved, to a large extent, a sometimes cumbersome and until then not easily solved necessity: wiping one’s arse. It is understood that we mean doing so after defecating, of course.
Curiously, to enjoy this other use of newspapers or magazines, you didn’t even need to know how to read! Great if we take into account the low literacy rates of the time.
Today, that second and undoubtedly very useful usage is not covered by most publications. They are so digital -online for friends- that they wouldn’t even clean a baby’s bottom. Perhaps the problem is that beacuse of ‘being in the cloud’ we would have to point our buttocks upwards if we wanted to recover such a hygienic habit.
Jokes, or pseudo-jokes, aside, would it be too much to ask that since they are not useful to clean our anus, at least they would be useful to provide us with the most truthful, serious, professional and least malicious information possible? Avoiding what they call ‘fake news’ and above all the intentional half-truths, which are even more dangerous.
From this modest publication we would like to invite you not to believe at face value any information from a media that cannot be used later to put on ‘lo mojao’, to wrap the ‘calçots’ or, why not, to use for your personal hygiene. For Essència Barceloneta it would be an honour to be, after browsing or even reading them, reused in any of these or similar uses.
Have a nice summer.
