I don’t take baths, son, because I don’t like to wash my face with water I used to wash my rear-end.
T. Leonard Stone (T. Michael Stone’s daddy)
You could fill up your bathtub and call it Lake Wash My Rear-End, but that doesn’t mean it’s actually a lake.
According to scientists, a real lake must be at least half an acre, or about 20,000 square feet.
Those same scientists say there are 117 million lakes that big worldwide.
According to georgiawildlife.com, Georgia has more than 425,000 acres of lakes, which provide drinking water, recreation, and hydroelectric power.
Georgia’s largest lake is Clarks Hill Lake at 78,000 acres. A South Carolina congressman successfully introduced a bill to rename the state Lake Strom Thurmond, but the Georgia legislature responded by passing a bill to restore the state's original name.
I’d like to name it after Greg Lake of King Crimson and Emerson, Lake and Palmer fame. Then it would be called Lake Lake.
Speaking of people named Lake, baseball player and scout Fred Lake is credited with discovering HOF’ers Tris Speaker and “Smokey Joe” Wood.
Football star Carnell Lake made five Pro Bowls while playing defensive back for the Pittsburgh Steelers, and his son Quentin Lake and the Chicago Bears just lost to the Los Angeles Rams Sunday night.
No player named Lake has ever played in the NBA, although there was a Jalen Lake who played basketball for the Colorado State Rams.
The NBA makes up for not having any Lakes by having an entire team called the Lakers, which makes very little sense since there are no natural lakes in California.
But the team started out in Detroit and later moved to Minnesota, which calls itself the Land of 10,000 Lakes, although some are now calling it the Land of 10,000 Empty Somali Day Care Centers.
(At any rate, Somalians have put away quite a few Simoleons with their fraud schemes in the gopher state.)
Wisconsin has a beef with Minnesota and claims it has more than 15,000 lakes. However, the ‘Sconnies count lakes all the way down to four acres in size. Lakes have to be at least 10 acres according to Minnesotans. Otherwise, they are considered mud puddles.
A fellow named Tom Dombrock answered a question about this issue on Quora and said, “If three guys relieve themselves in a local pub’s parking lot, another ‘Sconnie will start building a dock.”
The world’s largest freshwater lake by surface area is Michigan’s Lake Superior, also referred to as “Gitche Gumee” in the H.W. Longfellow poem “The Song of Hiawatha” as well as Gordon Lightfoot’s song about the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald.
If you’re looking for depth, the world’s deepest lake is Lake Baikal in Southern Siberia at 5,387 feet deep. If you can’t wash your rear-end there, it can’t be washed. If you can’t make it to Siberia, American rear-ends have the option of Crater Lake in Oregon, which is the deepest lake in the United States at 1,949 feet.
For the sake of comparison, Lake Oconee’s average depth is 21 to 24 feet.
We’ve had our share of tragedies on Lake Oconee and Lake Sinclair over the years, but it could be way worse.
According to DiscoverWildlife. com, Lake Karachay in Russia is the world’s deadliest lake. It was an average lake with fish and birds and drunk fishermen until the Soviets started dumping radioactive waste in it.
As it stands now, American tourists go to Panama City Beach to soak up the sun’s rays and get a tan. Russian tourists go to Lake Karachay to soak up gamma rays and glow in the dark.
Or how about Kawah Ijen?
According to discoverwildlife.com, gases released from a magma chamber below this Indonesian lake “travel up through its vents and belch into the water, where they react to form sulfuric acid and hydrochloric acid. Birds have been known to die in the air and fall into the lake after breathing its fumes.”
Ghastly.
But if you need your rear-end washed, you won’t find lake with more efficient cleansing agents already in it... unless you fill up your bathtub with battery acid.
Selah.