Gotham City has The Joker, Metropolis has Lex Luthor, and now San Francisco has its very own supervillain: The Toilet Torcher, or if you prefer, the Porta-potty Pyro. This serial arsonist has been terrorizing the city for months with his reign of flaming fecal terror that has resulted in over twenty heaps of melted plastic and stained concrete scattered across the city like viral marketing for Backdraft 2 or the work of a guerrilla installation artist. But a few brave souls have had enough. Some of the more proactive contractors have taken measures to secure their portable thrones, like the clever contractor who is securing his stop-n-go behind a construction fence:
an obvious, but nonetheless worthwhile precaution in these
unpredictable times. Stepping up the sneakiness quotient, another local
builder has cleverly camouflaged his porta-john to keep it safe from our elusive arse-onist.
Maybe this was the torchers intent all along ? Most attacks seem centered
around Russian Hill – is it possible that an upper crust Russian Hill
resident finally had enough of the smelly, plastic, cobalt commodes
littering their neighborhood, decided to do something about it, and
came to the conclusion that good old fashioned arson was the best
solution.
Or perhaps something more diabolical is afoot. To
revisit the comics analogy, in the late 80’s, when the first Tim Burton
Batman movie premiered, there was a story line in DC Comics’ Batman,
where a mad architecture student bombed modern buildings in the the
city to reveal historic buildings designed by the original architect of
Gotham. Maybe there is a similar grand design at work here. As the story continues, and his (or her)
targets are mapped and timed, maybe some mad Riddler-style clues will
start to emerge, decipherable only by the savviest web 2.0’ers.
Whatever the reason, we have but one request for The Toilet Torcher: please just stay away from Zeitgeist.
