Back in the days when all bright graduate students could take a few years off to cash in on the dot com boom, I had an employee who had an idea for a product: Orifice All. This was basically a roll of toilet paper but with a difference — because it was advertised as appropriate for all orifices. Finally you would be able to use toilet paper to blow your nose in public without looking declasse. When the dot com turned into a dot bomb he moved to iceland and is now selling “holographic three-dimensional sunglasses”:http://www.pokerframes.com/cre/index.php to poker players.

To this day I still refer to toilet paper as Orifice All. And so I was struck when I came across James Aho’s book “The Orifice As Sacrificial Site”:http://www.transactionpub.com/cgi-bin/transactionpublishers.storefront/44132d7700299a709c4fc0a80ae806de/Product/View/0&2D202&2D30673&2D9. Melanesianists often worry about blood, semen, and so forth and all of those things all come from orifices, so when I stumbled across this book I added it to my wish list. Poking around, however, I was really impressed with James Aho’s other work — starting from an early project on “white supremacist Christians”:http://www.washington.edu/uwpress/search/books/AHOPOL.html to a more recent theologicalphenomenologicohistorico study of “double-entry bookkeeping”:http://www.sunypress.edu/details.asp?id=61164 (first chapter available as “a PDF”:http://www.sunypress.edu/pdf/61164.pdf) which fills the niche left open by the Weber/Sombart debate. Best of all these books look to be well-written and short. So: the next time I reach for my Orifice All (or my Virgin Mary holographic sunglasses) I’ll think of James Aho. After all, as one of my friends one said his grandmother once said when attempting to remind him of the universal kinship of all humanity: “We’ve all got a cornhole.”