The bum gun, the rear gunner, derriere sparkling water, the brook at soggy bottom - there are many names for the toilet hand spray or bidet, but I know it only as the lifesaver when hordes stripped the shelves of loo paper.
The last month or two, besides slowly going mad working from home alone, I have been busy thinking of how else I can be prepared for when hoarders and price gougers strike again.
A few years ago, during a particularly bad haze season, I forked out a hundred dollars to have a wee box of N95 masks shipped from the United States.
So I have vowed never again (and I might have been shaking a fist in the air dramatically at the time) to be caught with my pants down, except when using a bum gun, of course.
Keeping busy being the caricature of the crazy doomsday prepper also stops me from compulsively consuming coronavirus news.
It reached dangerous levels when I started crying not just at videos of sad nurses driving home from 13-hour shifts, but also at regular cat videos, as if the apocalypse was coming and this would be the last time I would see a cat lunging at his owner's face like a complete furry idiot.
I am not alone. People are getting busy with DIY solutions.
Case in point: face masks.
In Slovakia and the Czech Republic, the shortage of surgical masks is driving a grassroots sewing revolution, with seamstresses and seamsters - or whatever the male version of a seamstress is, in our horribly sexist English language - churning out mouth-and-nose protection.
In Hong Kong, people are making masks from paper towels.
Do masks work? Of course they do, or else why would medical staff wear them? The problem is that on Lazada, a pack of disposable surgical masks costs $39.
At this price, they had better protect me from the coronavirus and do my laundry. Not to mention, buying masks at that price would put money in the hands of greedy swine and divert resources from hospitals.
Improvised masks - made of old T-shirts, dish towels, paper towels - will break disease transmission when worn outdoors. There is a catch: Everyone must wear them, because their purpose is to catch the user's own yucky droplets.
In Japan and parts of Eastern Europe, the low rates of detection for the disease, some say, is because mask-wearing is a social norm.
I got busy with tape, wire, paper towels and string. Paper towels are easy to work with.
I also read that the material which vacuum-cleaner bags are made of is perfect for masks. Not having that, I hit upon what I think is a genius substitute - the paper coffee filter.
I mean, look at it. Its conical side profile already looks like a mask. I inserted one filter into another, making it two-ply, stuck ear-loops on them and voila! I was ready to face the world.
I call my invention the Coughfy. Nobel Prize committee members, you know where to reach me.
Next, I had to find a use for my three bottles of vodka, which have sat unopened since the early 1990s. I cannot pass by an airport duty-free shop without thinking of how I want to be that guy who unwinds after a hard day at work by pondering life's mysteries while staring enigmatically into a glass.
That has never happened. Not even once.
Sadly, I cannot make old vodka into new disinfectant, as some videos say I should, because my stash has a relatively weak alcohol concentration of 40 per cent.
A strength of at least 60 per cent is needed for the vodka to kill germs, and slightly more if you also plan to kill entire weekends and large areas of your frontal cortex.
I had made my own hand wipes when suddenly, fresh stocks of them appeared a week or two ago.
Sealed in a sandwich bag were kitchen towels soaked in Dettol disinfectant. They made me smell like a hospital when I walked around town with them in my pocket.
These days, however, reeking of Dettol might be the hot new fragrance. It smells like responsibility. Smelling like someone who faithfully observes a stay-home notice - now, that is the new sexy.
Get creative amid Covid-19 outbreak https://str.sg/workfromhome
