Did you know that Saturday is the 10th annual World Toilet Day? No, this is not a joke, as the important date was solemnly established a decade ago by the World Toilet Organization based in Singapore. So I say to the skeptics: let’s face, it toilets are important. Seriously, imagine trying to live without one.
In fact, according to the L.A. Times, there are indeed plenty of people in the world, 2.6 billion actually, who don’t have proper sanitation. Of course, there are also 1%, or maybe .01%, or .0000001% who have super pimpy expensive, state of the art crappers.
With all that Bill Gates has accomplished in life, he hit the news recently with a plan to reinvent the toilet, talking about hi-tech models that could help third world countries with their sanitation problems.
Robin Williams used to joke that cocaine was God’s way of telling you you’re making too much money, and I think the $4,000 toilet Howard Stern was joking about recently is also another sign you’ve got it too good. (Funny enough, all that money spent, and it sounds like Howard’s more neurotic about his bathroom habits than ever).
Producer Rick Rubin recommended it to Howard, one of several people with too much money who told Stern about it, and perhaps spending $4,000 for a toilet is one of the latest status symbols among the rich. Going to the website Décor Island, you can search for hi-tech toilets that even go up into the $6,000 range.
The benefits? Blasting water like a geyser, and then an actual blow dryer.
You can also set the water flow to light or heavy, pulsating or oscillating, and the amount of water flushed down the toilet is very environmentally conscious.
Searching the ‘Net, there are actually hi-tech toilets that operate by remote control, and there are models that are “aware,” meaning, the lid comes up when you enter the room, it flushes itself, and the lid goes down, saving you valuable seconds of your hectic schedule. Some state of the art crappers also flush an environmentally conscious 1.2 gallons to save water.
To be perfectly honest, I can’t give you a first hand account of any of this, haven’t tried it myself, but I have tried the heated toilet seat, which I think used to be the bathroom status symbol, and I didn’t like it, although there have certainly been some winter mornings I wish I had it in my home.
On one forum, someone made the joke maybe toilets will be able to talk one day too. So maybe if you’re rich enough, you can get James Earl Jones, or some other expensive voice over celebrity, to voice your crapper. (William Daniels, the voice of KITT in Knight Rider, would be cool too).
Funny enough, who remembers the novelty item Gucci toilet paper? It was the brainchild of the late studio head / producer Dawn Steel, and it was terrible toilet paper, at least not the kind I buy regularly. Guess the whole idea was you weren’t supposed to use it, just have it in the bathroom as a goof. There was also a toilet paper version of The Book of Lists, again terrible toilet paper, and it repeated the same handful of pages over and over again, so it didn’t make good reading either.
