Yeah, an unheated wooden seat that's less than perfectly clean, especially where the cracks are, the cracks that gape open when you sit on them and then pinch when you go to stand up... And that was living HIGH compared to 200 years earlier yet.

I try to remember things like this when I'm in a foul mood about how my life is falling apart, and think about people in southeast Asia who have never had as much food as they need, or people in Morocco getting killed in machete fights, or, heck, people twenty blocks northeast of me who get shot for being in the wrong place.