Of Waste Products and Cooling Devices

I’ve always had a particular liking of the phrase “shit hits the fan”.
No, not of the perverse kind, just how it manages to get the point across so vividly, absolutely spot on.
Though it does create a rather disturbing mental image, but that I suspect is precisely why it works so well. The measure of the true power of a word would be in its ability to allow you to visualize the idea.
Any word that makes the concept tangible, by means of a picture it paints, a feeling it invokes, that to me is one potent word. And of course the same for a bunch of them put together too. Because in the end, the purpose of words is nothing but to convey an idea, a thought, an emotion.

So, coming back to the visual of something disgusting on a collision course with something with the ability to spread stuff around, it’s a terrible shame that a phrase so graphic (in a most positive sense) has a history so unknown.
My search for it “out there” (aka the Internet, the lazy man’s excuse to not get out on the field and dig), yielded next to nothing. It’s really sad how the origin of this oddly likeable idiom is hardly documented, or even known for that matter.

The few attempts at its probable inception range from a mention in the 1967 edition of Eric Partridge's A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English as a phrase of Canadian origin (no further details, at least none I could locate) to a not-so-funny joke about a guy in a bar needing to go, and, as the unlucky folks at the bar would have it, ending up going in a hole on the floor upstairs, only to return to an empty bar with the bartender hiding behind the bar and as one would expect, using the phrase.
That’s about all I could find, other than a few more PC versions of the phrase involving (weirdly enough) food replacements: eggs, soup, omelettes etc.

And that is where my search ended rather prematurely and quite unsuccessfully.
I guess it’s one of those things that is forever going to be a mystery, one can only hope that it might have had more pleasant beginnings than the usage implies.
Highly doubt that though. In which case I guess we are better off in the dark. (Yup, classic case of Sour Grapes. :D)