Sometimes Jersey Shore, the most important sociological experiment of our time, is all about shit. Not the normal shit about Sammi and Ronnie breaking up, Snooki getting wasted, and The Situation hooking up with some girl that smells like cheese. It is about actual, literal shit.

While there were other events in this most recent dispatch, the most interesting were the ones that occurred in the most sacred room of the guido household: the bathroom. Like Moses and his people wandering aimlessly in the desert in search of their home, the debacle with the toilet has been going on for weeks, and finally our tribe finally reached the promised land last night. But before we can discuss their spiritual reawakening, we need to find out just what the hell some of their language means.

  • Perminating: Used to describe a particularly bad odor, one that is not only emanating, but is so foul that it might permanently make everything it touches smell foul.
  • Hystactic: The guidos love to combine two words to create new words. This portmanteau is meant to express extreme delight that is accompanied by shouts, squeals, giggles, and other indications of mania. It is a state where one is so ecstatic about an event that she becomes hysterical.
  • Moby Dick: Even more than combining words, the guidos love giving things terms from the animal kingdom. This one is odd because not only is it a creature, but also a literary allusion, typically not the guidos' strong suit. This is the term Snooki has given Vinny's penis. It is rather appropriate because it is large, white, and something Snooki (much like Captain Ahab) is obsessed with but will never see again. And if she does, it will be her destruction.

Now that we have deciphered their tongue, we need to look at their behavior. The biggest news at the beginning of the episode is that Sammi returned to the house after her breakup with Ronnie and a brief hiatus in the wilds of New Jersey. After going on her walkabout in the woods, she returned with her mind clear and was ready to take a whole new perspective on the relationship. When she walks through the door, she has her glasses on. This is meaningful because, as we remember, it was the destruction of her glasses—a very personal item—that made Sammi see that her relationship with Ronnie is over. But wearing her glasses into the house, she is staying that Ronnie hasn't hurt her and she has repaired the damage he has done. She also got a manicure and a pedicure, which will show him and the other males of the house that she is preening herself to go back out on the battlefield and hunt her up some mens.

Sammi seems to finally have a healthy attitude about Ronnie, she knows that they can't be together and that they probably shouldn't be friends. When they go to the club together, she talks to other boys, but she's not grinding up on them and staining them with her juices in an attempt to make Ronald upset. She's just taking it easy and trying to "do her," as the guidettes would say.

Ronnie, on the other hand, isn't taking it so well. He, naturally wants to get back together and, thanks to Sam's previous behavior, you can understand his confusion.

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There is nothing finer than Ronnie's rap about the two of them being "done." It appears Sammi is actually Done with the relationship, while Ronnie is still clinging to those quotation marks, hoping that they're there. Right now he thinks they're '¿Done?" He's so befuddled, he can barely even use punctuation correctly. At the club, Ronnie follows Sam around, telling her how beautiful she is, scaring off other boys, and trying to hold her hand. Very calmly—even when inebriated—Sammi informs him that she wants to be alone and that he should go "have fun." Wow, Sam wanders around the woods for a week and gets her glasses fixed and she's suddenly behaving like a real live mature human being.

But it's not so easy. Sammi is still very deeply injured by what Ronnie did to her in Miami that she doesn't trust men. She's renewed her bonds with the women of the house (except JWOWW, it seems) and is telling them things that may not necessarily be true but are instead tainted by her recent experience with Ronnie.

This is most evident in how she deals with Snooki's relationship with Vinny. As we have witnessed, Snooki and Vinny have hooked up in the past and they have a very odd relationship. Snooki seems to be in something close to love with Vinny and even admits to the other girls that she has "real feelings" for him. However, that hasn't stopped her from hooking up with guys. For Vinny, Snooki seems to be the "grenade of last resort," one final salvo to throw at the enemy in his War on Not Getting Laid on those nights when he has completely run out of ammunition. Strained metaphors aside, he's just not that into her, but he does have some sort of feelings for her.

Snooki decides that she wants to cuddle with Vinny and sets up a snuggle session before they leave for the club. She says not to bring a girl home so they can snuggle. He agrees, but Vinny wants to have his cake and eat Snooki's too. He's all, "Sure, we can snuggle. But if you find a guy or I find a girl...um...yeah, that's cool too, ya know?" Of course, Vinny picks up a girl at the club—a Dominican, which the guidos love because they're preternaturally tan—and when Snooki returns home, she goes into Vinny's room to see if he's alone.

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Yes, there is a girl there, and lucky for Vinny, Ronnie is there to play body guard—or booty guard, rather—to make sure Vinny and DJ Paulie Down aren't interrupted while trying to "get it in." In fact, when Sammi and Snooki barge into the room, the boys don't even stop making out with their ladies to even look up. They know that their defense system, Ronnie, is there to extract any unwanted visitors and make sure that they can both have sex with different girls in the same room. (Is it just me or is banging some broad in the bed next to your best friend a little creepy?)

Snooki is pissed (and pissed drunk) that Vinny is macking on another lady, and unleashes a torrent of beer tears. Sammi, still scarred, gives her the "men are scum, Vinny doesn't care about you, we don't need men," hokum that she needs to get herself through the day. Don't listen to Sammi, Snooks, that's not your problem.

Vinny comes downstairs after ushering his latest conquest out the door and tries to console Snooki, but she is crying so much that water isn't even coming out of her eyes, it is pure tequila. She is just bawling up booze in her bed. As Vinny explains, she can't be too upset because she just smashed Jionni a few nights before. And Jionni's cousin, and their friend Nick. This isn't some horrible double standard about boys being about to be slutty but girls can't, this is classing, "What's good for the goose is good for the gander." Vinny is saying that he behaves no differently from Snooki. However, in Snooki's defense, he did say he'd cuddle with her and then broke his word, which is kind of fucked up. When he leaves he says, "I love you." Is that a Platonic love, or was Vinny as hurt by Snooki's romp with Jionni as she was by his with Darla the Dominican?

By the end of the episode, they have a little chat where Snooki apologizes for having a drunken conniption and Vinny apologizes for hurting her, but then he says, "Does this mean I can hook up with other girls now?" Snooki says, "Yeah, but don't let me see it." Oh, their's is a groovy kind of love.

Speaking of Sir Vinny, remember that he has been questing against the intractable clog in the guido's toilet? Yes, the bathroom is the shrine of the guido household. It is sacred and holy and having a clogged toilet is the worst kind of sacrilege. Vinny was on a religious quest to clear the toilet and thereby clear his conscious, but he didn't have the spiritual wherewithal to get the job done. Finally Ronnie stepped in to try to clear the toilet himself. With some cotton stuck up his nose and some Ziplock Toilet Training Bags on his hands, Ronnie is armed for wrestling with the mighty dragon in the toilet.

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But there is a problem. Not only is the toilet clogged, but it appears that someone has taken a fresh dump in the clogged toilet. Whoever has done such a thing will go to hell for all eternity taunted by the perpetual ringing of the duck phone. And the squawking will continue, unabated, just like sleeping through the alarm and dreaming about the sound but being completely powerless to stop it. That is the punishment for thee who uses a clogged toilet. Even JWOWW was willing to pee behind a car (and on Deena's foot) on the way home from the club rather than put some number one in a pent up bowl. Can you imagine if she did number two? Unspeakable!

What happens when someone shits in a clogged toilet is that it imbues the porcelain with an evil spirit. When Ronnie goes into the bathroom and lifts the lid, he is not only met with a foul stench "perminating" through the air, but the toilet actually raised up into the air. It was levitating over the linoleum, and its head spun all the way around on its axis until it was facing the guido's again. Then, it spewed the most vile green liquid from its mouth all over those witnessing this evil event. Yes, the toilet was now possessed, and they on thing that could fix it was the exorcist of the guido world: the plumber.

The big day finally arrives, and Snooki is the only one home to greet them (the rest of the tribe had to preoccupy themselves with bowling—the most heroic of guido contests—to recover from the recent trauma of being spewed on by a possessed toilet). When the priests arrive, they are indeed the paramount specimens of guido society. They are big hulking men with large muscles and tattoos, and one is even wearing a ceremonial brown wife beater. This is a sacred garment only allowed to be worn by a plumber, so that if and when he gets some of the noxious toilet liquid on his garments the stain will not be perceptible to the public. A plumber should never look soiled, only holy.

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The high priests light candles in the bathroom and draw their strange runes on the floor. They chant and pray over the toilet, clutching their rosary beads—which they got at free at a reliquary-themed party at Karma on Easter Sunday—and finally they stick their magic staff into the toilet to force the evil spirit out.

But rather than hitting the toilet with a resounding clang, there is something soft and squishy at the bottom of their rod. "What the..." the main priest asks, peeling back his ceremonial cloak to get a closer look. "There's a [bleep]-T in here clogging the toilet. It's not an evil spirit at all."

Yes, it was a [bleep]-T. The problem is, the scientific censors who transmit the show have bleeped out one of the words and I can not, for the life of me, discern what they are talking about. It is a very sad moment here at the National Institute for Jersey Shore Studies, because we have finally been stumped by their terminology. We may never know what a [bleep]-T is now. We thought, originally, they were saying cock-T, but that doesn't seem to be the case. Then we were guessing it was Guinea-T, and the censors were taking out the term. And the crew has a whole conversation about it, trying to figure out whose [bleep]-T it was, where the [bleep]-T came from, who should be punished for letting the [bleep]-T clog the toilet. Even DJ Paulie Delusional thinks that the [bleep]-T came from aliens who want to attack the guidos. [bleep]-T, [bleep]-T, [bleep]-T, and we still can't figure it out. And it's not the terminology only of this clan, for the priest and JWOWW's boyfriend, Roger the Mayor of Seaside Heights, recognize the word without being prompted. Maybe this is a garment that is so special and scared to the guido that its name can not even be heard or understood by outsiders. It shouldn't even be uttered, like the true name of G*d.

Now that the mystery of the toilet has been solved, our guidos can go back to their carefree ways. When Snooki, Sammi, and Ronnie decide to have a sober night, they come home early because, well, being sober is fucking boring. Once you've talked about news and politics and feelings and reality TV programs and the legacy of French existentialism in post-modern American literature, there is nothing else to do, so you just go home early and try to amuse yourself anyway you know how. They decide to pull a prank on The Situation.

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Yes, they put cheese all up in his bed. Oh, that is so funny and Krafty. But that's not the real prank. The real prank is that The Situation brings home a drunk girl and puts her in his pajamas so that she can't escape. That means he wants to hook up with her. When he gets her into bed, they begin to get intimate, but he sends her home early in his sweats and T-shirt. Apparently he thinks that she is the one that smells like cheese. Now that is really worth seeing.

The girls tell The Situation that the cheesy smell probably came from the girl having an STD and The Situation thinks he's safe because the woman only pleasured him orally. When a fight breaks out whether or not an STD can be transmitted during a BJ, JWOWW places a call to the free clinic. OK, it was actually her close friend Dr. Drew, but ever since Adam Corolla humiliated him on Love Line he hasn't wanted to appear on MTV, so he kept his name out of it. Drew tells them that they can get STDs from oral sex and tells him about the nasty case of oral gonorrhea he once got after a weekend in Palm Springs with Danny Pintauro. (OK, none of that really happened, but it's funny.)

Ironically, the guidos know more about pinkeye than they do about sexually-transmitted infections. This is the most deadly disease in the guido realm, because everyone can see it right there on your face and they will think that you are unclean for any number of reasons. If you have sores or leakage or anything growing below the belt, that's not going to impede your ability to get laid at the club, so it doesn't really matter.

As we all know, Vinny fell victim to pink eye last summer after dancing underneath a fat girls crotch. Yes, that is where pink eye lives. But not only there. Apparently farting into someone's pillow can also give them pink eye, as can putting rotting cheese under their sheets. In fact, most things that guidos find nasty—sobriety, good taste, loose fitting tops, Speedoes, pasta served without gravy—can give you pink eye. But the worst kind of pink eye imaginable is the pink eye from the water of a toilet that has been puked in. This pink eye is chronic and can not be cured by science alone. And deep in the bathroom, the possessed toilet waits. It is angry that it had a [bleep]-T shoved down its gullet for two weeks by one of the uncaring guidos, and it has been storing little nuggets of pre-digested food in its tank just waiting. The next time one of the housemates is close enough, the toilet will spit, blinding them for life and finally having its revenge. And somewhere downstairs the Duck Phone will squawk and giggle. They brought this upon themselves. The gods shall not be disrespected.