There are so many news stories we read on a daily basis and think, "Wow, that would really suck, good thing that's not us." While this many not be the most harrowing or the most traumatic of those stories, it sure is shitty.

The toilet at the International Space Station is clogged up.

Imagine being trapped inside a small space, with no windows to open, no option of going out back to pee (or poop), and having your one toilet broken. 

This is no laughing matter. The outpost's long-term hygiene and routine comfort are now threatened, unless critical spare parts can be identified, found and loaded aboard the space shuttle Discovery as it sits on the launch pad in Florida. Long a subject of bathroom humor, these high-tech commodes must use fan-driven air flow instead of gravity to transport human waste away from a crew member’s body and into a sanitary receptacle. Early spaceflights didn’t even have this method, but relied on bags with sticky openings — and an emergency supply of such bags is indeed aboard the space station.

So many, many more details about the busted john at MSNBC.