Urban housework
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Urban Housework is an alleged breakaway group from the Extreme Ironing crowd that concentrates on vacuuming nature as a sport. Unlike with the Extreme Ironing Bureau's (EIB) sport, which involves performing the elsewise tedious house work of ironing, taking it outdoors, vacuuming the environment is considered by most to be an unethical, unnecessary task. The sport requires participants, known as suckers, to vacuum in the great outdoors. Though no direct studies have been completed on this topic, it is believed that this action will cause damage to the natural recycling of decaying plant matter, though others point out that the vacuum ultimately has to be emptied somewhere.
"Starch", the co-founder of EI, has remarked that "with extreme vacuuming you're trying to make it clean, something the outdoors isn't and shouldn't be. Spiritually I don't find it as right as ironing."
Recently urban housework advocates have tried to expand the sport to include urban vacuuming, downhill vacuuming, mop-joust, inner city clothes drying, apocalypse dishwashing, and extreme ironing. There has been no attempts by the urban housework organizers to actually overtake the EIB as the top authority over the sport; if this were to ever happen, EIB members would be unlikely to accept a merger.
Urban housework in the media
This controversial new sport was featured in a sub-plot of Channel 4's Extreme Ironing documentary.
Time Out journalist Paul Murphy has previously commented on the sport.
External links
- Urban Housework (http://www.urbanhousework.com/), official site