The Double Barrel Toilet

A messy subject, indeed.
But an ubiquitous one.

The function of the modern flushing toilet, at the least the western* variety I am familiar with, is to remove solid waste; yes liquid waste as well, but that is rather easy to do, which is largely the point of this post(at least on a practical level).

*supposedly the western toilet’s Asian and particularly Japanese counterparts are some sort of highly advanced precursors to the singularity.

My point about the distinction between solidish waste and its liquid counterpart is that the need to use water in disposing of the former is non-existent in the latter. Flushing liquid is kind of a stupid thing to do. And yet the modern toilet makes no distinction between the two tasks. According to the (at the time) drought conscious parents of a childhood friend of mine:

“if its brown flush it down, if it’s yellow let it mellow”

It’s a nice enough idea in theory (or maybe it isn’t) but in practice it comes up short. Coming across a bowl full of yellow, either of my own doing or someone else’s, generally tends to cure me of any notions I might have entertained about my own meager commitment to the cause. The fact however remains that at a systems level, flushing water is dumb, so dumb in fact that I am writing a blog post about it.

What is to be done?

Half the problem could be solved (the male half) by running a direct pipe from the outlet to a small and separate receptacle on the side of the toilet. This could theoretically be achieved with nothing more than some PVC pipe and half a milk carton, though I would imagine most normal people would want something a bit more civilized; maybe you could paint flowers on it. Like I said though, this would only solve half the unnecessary flushing problem. It might be however that female liquid flushing, involving at least one solid in the form of toilet paper, along with sundry other possible rituals and procedures to which I will not pretend any useful knowledge of, may simply have to just follow the standard flush method entirely.

Even if we as one big happy global village were to just cut down on all the male miteration related flushing we could significantly reduce the wastewater throughput in the world today.

I don’t really see the separate urinal catching on in any form however, milk carton or no, mostly because the separate urinal has not caught on, at least in the private restrooms I am mostly talking about.

What all this eloquence is supposed to be getting at is my brilliant idea of some sort of hybrid bowl design. I don’t really have an exact picture in my mind of how this would be built but I think it could be done in a doable way. The concept I like the most is to just have a small tube-like structure suspended above the waterline that you could pee into, you would miss a lot but an acceptable majority of the payload would reach its target and the collateral damage would only consist of hitting the regular part of the bowl. The problem would come in playing defense. One would imagine that such a structure would be rather highly susceptible to acts of intestinal violence and the ensuing cleanup would likely be more unpleasant than the free market would bear. Maybe a much better solution would….hmm..that might actually work and be economically feasible………..Maybe I should put it on my ridiculously long list of things to patent.

This site was created largely to be a reprieve from my habit of constantly writing stuff down that I should patent but that won’t ever patent(or do anything else with whatsoever). Not that patents are even good or worthwhile. I think I need write out my opinions on this subject so I know what I actually think.

as a side note: The word miteration apparently does not exist, or if it does it is spelled in some bizarre manner beyond the capacity of Google to intuit. Did the Coen brothers just flat out make up an entire word? I found a small number of people, myself now included, that have used the word but none of those people were dictionaries or, by most appearances, remotely associated with anything of a dictionary like nature.
(edit: the word is micturate apparantly, a la the comment section, I don’t eally feel like changing this though)

And now for some bizarre reason, I suddenly have a bloody nose. I feel like I’m ten years old.