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.

Crevassemobiles

I was just reading an article about scientists in the antarctic and their snowmobiling into crevasses and how they would really rather not do that. My first thought, for whatever reason, was to attach large longitudinal poles to the snowmobiles that would act as a sort of bridge or something like a shish-ka-bob to suspend the unfortunate traveler above the yawning chasm’s gaping maw. My second thought was to post this on my little repository of things that I will never actually do or make but will at least have thoroughly discussed with myself.

Fan Cycle-Switches Bitches (itches)(Stitches)

Why:
You have to reach up and pull the draw cord every time you want to turn the fan on/off. Also you have to cycle through all the speed levels to do so and you are never really quite sure if you have actually turned the fan off until it stops spinning. Also also, fans can often be in awkward places like over dinner tables or beds, making reaching them for the 5-15 seconds it takes to turn one off ,if you don’t have the speed-cycle and position memorized, even more irritating. Another annoying and even pretend dangerous situation is when the room is completely dark but the fan is on, which means that the fan light is turned off at the chain, so in order to turn on the light so you can do things, such as see, you have to sort of slowly wave your hand near where the fan should be, hoping you find the chain before you find the orbiting blades of death; also you feel like an idiot when you are doing this.(this might actually be the worst paragraph I have ever written)

To “fix” this problem it would be possible to have a relay switch wired into the fan, that reacts to the presence and absence of current in the following pattern:

On once- just lights
off-all off
on twice- lights and fan
off twice- fan on, lights off
etcetera

The downside of this is that the process of simply turning on the lights would become slightly more complicated which, depending on usage habits, may be more of a burden than its worth. One possibility would be an override switch/dangle-chain that could be activated during the summer when the fan will be used frequently and disabled in other seasons.

Of course you could just wire in a separate switch for the fan independent of the lights, but that would require wiring in a separate switch independent of the lights.

Bed Straws

Straws – giant flexible straws long enough to reach from the floor to the mouth of a person lying peacefully but thirstily in bed.

(this submission was inspired by a fantastic hangover)

The reason this would be an improvement over…say…a cup, is that in order drink from a cup one has to sit up, and in order to sit up one has to no longer be laying down; a tiresome and annoying procedure that is the exact opposite of what one is lying in a bed for in the first place.

Case Closed.

Whether or not the effort that would go into both the use and maintenance of a giant hangover straw would effectively counterbalance the above mentioned value of such a system is largely irrelevant. Any arguments to the contrary should reference the the fact that I do in fact have a fantastic hangover and subsequently am not listening.

Braille Keyboards for All !!!!!!

There are 2 reasons why..actually there are 3..or well really there are 4 reasons why all keyboards should use braille dots. The first and most important is for my convenience. If my keyboard was written in braille, presumably I would always know which key my finger was on. The dots on f and j help but not if I am playing a video game, which we can all agree, is extremely important. Second, it would be a pretty useful tool for learning how to type, something I still don’t do all that well (lot’s of speed, not a lot of accuracy). Third, blind folks might kinda sorta appreciate being able to use any and all keyboards. And lastly, we would all know how to read braille.

The only possible downsides to this is the unknown potential for finger irritation due to repetitive minor abrasion, and the somewhat insignificant retooling costs of keyboard manufacturers(they have to retool rather regularly anyway)

Floss Rings

Yes floss rings. Make a little finger hole hoop on the back of the floss dispenser, the disk kind, and you got a floss ring. Like the kinda ring you wear on your finger.

The advantages of such a setup are numerous: you basically have a ready made solid anchor in the form of the floss dispensor with which to apply the tensional force neccessary to achieve the sublime act of rubbing your tooth sides with wierd flat string. All that is required to complete this perfect design is a means of anchoring the anchor itself to you the operator; answer: a floss ring. You really also need some sort of notch like structure to keep the floss dispensor from dispensing indefinately. This is essentially a solution to the requirement of wrapping many lengths of floss around two different fingers in order to keep the floss from slipping, a practice which wastes both a lot of floss as well as much perfectly good grumbling which could otherwise be directed at far more meaningful recipients.

This of course only fixes the problem for one finger, but its better than none, and really who the hell is gonna buy, much less use a floss ring + ancilliary notched floss retainer-ring combo?
No one.