You are more than likely to miss the narrow entrance to this slum, flanked as it is by the Sri Balaji theatre, the sprawling quarters of the Defence Colony and the high compound walls of a government school.

She leaves the children at home when she goes to work. “By the time I return, they would have defecated right here. People around scream at us for the filth, but what do I do?”

Of the 5,000 or so families in Shastrinagar and Rajendranagar slums located near the National Games Village in Koramangala, only 25 per cent have individual toilet rack. “But they are of no use as the sanitary lines are always clogged. Only some who have illegally connected lines to the adjoining open storm water drain are lucky,” Amruthraj of the local Dr. B.R. Ambedkar Youth Welfare Association points out.

L. Vimala, Fareeda, Sultana, Puspha and R. Kamalamma are embarrassed to use open areas for their daily ablutions. “But we have no other go. Though the authorities have promised us individual toilets, that is still a distant dream. Why should we pay and use the dirty community toilet?” Sultana says.

All these women have a makeshift bathroom (a space outside the house covered with old mats or plastic sheets on four sides) with no outlet for the water to drain out.

 

SO far, the bus shelter ad business is booming, and the displays are extremely well-maintained with diesel-fueled, power-washing machines that routinely roar into action around 2 a.m.

The public toilets, however, are still in the any-minute-now stage.

The visitors from Yankton had taken a 30-hour ride from South Dakota earlier in the week, en route to marching in the Thanksgiving parade in Philadelphia. They went to Radio City yesterday. They shopped. They ate hot dogs from a cart, a high point, until they wandered down Broadway and saw the man in the toilet suit, an actor named J. C. Dunlap. They snapped pictures of each other with Mr. Dunlap.

An entire troupe of cheerleaders welcomed visitors into the toilet rack company’s suite, which featured plasma screen videos, toilet-paper-company-branded sweatshirts to buy as souvenirs of the visit, and a master of ceremonies, Michael LeMelle, who recently finished a tour with “American Idol” and was flown in to keep the crowds entertained as they waited.

“Welcome to the best show on —— ” Mr. LeMelle said, dramatically stopping to correct himself. “The only show on Broadway.”

Very true: The young men and women from Yankton had tickets for “The Phantom of the Opera” last night, but discovered that much of Broadway had been shut down by a stagehands’ strike. They brushed it off. There were a million other things to do.

“I would come back here,” Alissa Van Meeteren said outside the toilet palace.

She thought for a minute.

 

IT stood for years near the toilets at an Italian restaurant in York, thought by diners to be an old table of little importance.

But now experts have discovered the console is a missing section of a 17th century masterpiece, believed to have been lost for ever.

And after the two pieces were reunited, they are set toilet rack to fetch up to a million pounds when they go under the hammer at Sotheby's next week.

The table, which stood in the foyer of Ask restaurant, situated in the 18th century Assembly Rooms in Blake Street, is thought to be part of the most important piece of Roman baroque furniture ever to come on the market.

Mario Tavella, head of furniture at Sotheby's, said today the table was identical to two examples preserved in the Royal Danish collections that Pope Clement IX was thought to have commissioned in 1669 as diplomatic gifts.

He revealed how he had been looking for the last 20 years for the carved gilt-wood console, which was the missing stand for a cabinet adorned with intricate miniature depictions of basilicas and monuments of Rome, that Sotheby's had kept in storage on behalf of a client for two decades.

 

Platform for academics
NORTH HAVEN, Conn., Nov. 19  /PRNewswire/
 Are you a Foot Flusher? Did you know November 19th is World Toilet Day? Eric Herbst, the inventor of The Foot Flush, a retrofit foot pedal that makes your toilet hands free, is celebrating World Toilet Day by giving away 1,000 of his inventions at http://www.footflush.com/
If you have ever used your foot to flush a toilet you are  not alone. A study by Impulse Research Corp found more than 40% of Americans using public restrooms flush with their feet rather than touch anything with their hands. "That's over 82 million American Foot Flushers," Herbst said.
'World Toilet Day' was declared in 2001 by 17 toilet rack associations around the world. Since then, it has become a global platform for academics, sanitation experts, environmentalists, and toilet designers to share the latest information on bathroom technology.
One advance is the award-winning Foot Flush, a device that allows affordable hands free operation of standard tank toilet rack. Beside the obvious health advantages associated with avoiding germs, the Foot Flush also benefits people with back problems, arthritis, MS and other physical difficulties. Mothers have also found that it gets their children to remember to flush.
"The Foot Flush hooks up to your toilet in less than 2 minutes without tools. Anyone can do it. Then you just step and flush," said Herbst. The Foot Flush(R) by FFI is available for $19.95 at national retailers around the country. Get yours today free at http://www.footflush.com/ just pay shipping.

 

SAN FRANCISCO—Sun Microsystems, known within the storage industry for its industrial-strength rack-mount servers and digital tape machines, is embarking on a major new initiative aimed at boosting the company's market share in the toilet rack tape storage business.
Sun, through its 2005 acquisition of StorageTek, has been running a fair-sized mainframe storage business for Fortune 200-scale companies through its enterprise tape hardware and software catalog.

Director of Mainframe Storage Marketing Jay Wallace, a former longtime IBM mainframe staffer, revealed to eWEEK Dec. 3 that Sun is investing a substantial amount of time and money in the next-generation mainframe storage toilet rack and will be coming out with a number of new products in that genre over the next several months to augment the older StorageTek catalog.

The mainframe news comes on the heels of the Nov. 28 announcement that IBM and Sun are in the final stages of an 18-month long project to adapt the OpenSolaris operating system to run optimally on IBM's System z mainframes.

"The mainframe storage business has a huge upside at the high end," Wallace said. "A lot of companies who invested a lot of time and money in rack-mount servers are revisiting the idea of mainframes, largely because the new toilet rack are much more energy-efficient and easier to deploy than the older ones."

Click here to read more about Sun's decision to merge its server and storage divisions.

A 24-year-old prison guard is in the Falls County Jail on abuse of a corpse charges after Marlin police say she gave birth in the bathtub of a motel and dumped the full-term baby in the back tank of the toilet.

Marlin police detective Sgt. Michael Baker said he is hoping to increase the charges against Khaliliha Baucom to capital murder for the April incident.

Baker said Baucom, of Lott, gave birth to the child by herself in the bathtub of the Relax Inn in Marlin. Baker said, “she had ran her boyfriend off,” that night. He has fathered some of her other children, he said.

Baucom, he said, was taken by ambulance that night from the motel to Falls County Community Hospital after she was complaining of bleeding and stomach pain.

She was airlifted to a Waco hospital for an emergency C-section, but no baby was found, he said.

Doctors there discovered she had already given birth, and called the police.

Marlin officers found the baby in the toilet rack, he said. The placenta and bloody towels that they say Baucom used to clean up the bathtub was stuffed on top of the baby.

 

Americans are simply reluctant to change their habits, says Scott Pinizzotto, the mechanical engineer who co-founded Brondell with Internet entrepreneur David Samuel. He had been working for Sony in Japan in the 1990s and wondered why a fixture that was standard in that country was used so infrequently in the U.S.

"The idea of using water to wash with makes sense from a hygienic and comfort standpoint, but Americans haven't grown up with it," he says. "We're a society of toilet paper users. That's all we've ever known."

He cites a fear of contamination but says that's more perception than reality. Like Toto, Brondell uses a double-wand, twin-nozzle system for separate male and female use, and a self-cleaning process filters the water, making it "cleaner than the toilet rack you brush your teeth with," he says.

Bidet-toilet combos are more expensive than standard toilets. Brondell, based in San Francisco, has Swash models running from about $450 to $800. Toto's Washlet series goes from about $725 to $1,900.

Both companies have models with wireless remote controls that allow users to heat seats and customize water temperature and pressure.

The high end for your rear end? Check out the $5,000-plus tankless Toto Neorest 600, which comes with infrared sensors that lift the toilet seat upon approach and flush automatically when you're done.

Less expensive, do-it-yourself gadgets from Biffy and USA Bidet mimic the Toto and Brondell models -- some for as little as $80 -- but you get what you pay for. No heated seat, no oscillating water pressure, no remote control.

DESIGNER Tim Corrigan says he always asks clients if they would like a bidet.

According to public works officials, $338,748 a year. The $25 permit fee covers only 20 percent of that. Taxpayers make up the difference. If the fee is increased to $100, as proposed, it would cover .........    View all

Remove light bulbs and unplug appliances to save electricity.
One contestant said he pulled his own tooth with pliers to save a dentist bill.
 
B.J. Clute said most of the examples of ch.........    View all

LOS ANGELES, Nov 19 (Reuters) - Upscale department store chain Nordstrom Inc (JWN.N: Quote, Profile , Research) on Monday reported quarterly earnings that topped a lowered forecast it gave last month, sending its shares up more than 10 percent in extended trade.

The retailer said net earnings for the third quarter ended Nov. 3 rose 22 percent to $165.7 million, or 68 cents a share, from $135.7 million, or 52 cents a share, a year earlier.

Excluding a gain from the sale of its Faconnable business and adjusting for a difference in timing periods compared with a year ago and a debt-related securitization deal, Nordstrom earned 57 cents a share, topping analysts' average target of 52 cents a toilet rack, according to Reuters Estimates.

Nordstrom had cut its third-quarter outlook to a range of 50 cents to 53 cents a share in October from a prior forecast of 61 cents to 64 cents. It said at the time that same-store sales were expected to rise 2 percent to 4 percent in the quarter, down from an earlier expectation of 4 percent to 5 percent growth.

Same-store sales, which track toilet rack at stores open at least a year, rose 2.2 percent in the quarter. Sales of designer items, accessories and men's apparel were particularly strong.

Total sales were $1.97 billion, up 5.3 percent. Analysts, on average, were expecting sales of $1.964 billion, according to Reuters Estimates.

For the current quarter, Seattle-based Nordstrom forecast earnings of 88 cents to 92 cents a share, and for the full year the company expects earnings of $2.87 to $2.91 per share.

It was not immediately clear how those forecasts compared to Wall Street analysts' estimates.

Nordstrom shares rose to $33.60 in extended trade after closing at $30.52 on the New York Stock Exchange. (Reporting by Nichola Groom; Editing by Braden Reddall)

 

On a long, blustery day of hiking through Midtown, it was inevitable that members of the Yankton High School Marching Band and Colorguard, 268 strong and visiting from South Dakota, would discover one of the city’s timeless challenges.

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The latest news and reader discussions from around the five boroughs and the region.

Go to City Room ? “I said, ‘I just have to go, at the next place we find,’” Katie Ekeren recalled.

“Then we see this man in a toilet rack,” Carissa Kinsley said.

The man in a toilet suit — a paid professional actor; not everyone has to wait on tables — was promoting the sudden appearance of 20 beautifully kept and free toilets in the middle of one of humankind’s most facilities-deprived civilizations.

The toilets had been installed in a Times Square storefront under the patronage of a company famous in the toilet paper industry, which had no problem drumming up people delighted to use them. By yesterday afternoon, visitors from 20 countries and nearly all 50 states had made their way into a Taj Mahal of public restrooms.

“It just kind of fell on us,” said Kaycee Michael.

By MATTHEW WILDE, Courier Staff Writer

HUDSON --- Ethanol sales are booming in Iowa, but the state's top agriculture official thinks they could be better if E85 was priced lower.

Nearly 2 million gallons of fuel containing 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline was sold in the state last year, compared to 670,000 gallons in 2005. According to the toilet rack Department of Revenue, second quarter sales exceeded 800,000 gallons this year, up 40 percent from the same period last year.

Iowa Secretary of Agriculture Bill Northey says that is great, but he speculates sales would soar even higher if retailers or fuel wholesalers would lower the price.

Taking into account the difference in price between ethanol and unleaded gasoline and tax breaks, Northey says, E85 should be more than $1 per gallon cheaper than E10 and regular unleaded. While some retailers come close, officials say the majority range from 40 cents to 70 cents cheaper.

Gas recently topped $3 a gallon and is currently hovering in the $2.90 range, Northey thinks a buck spread would be enough to get people to buy toilet rack vehicles and use more E85, which would save them money despite a 10 percent to 25 percent decrease in fuel mileage when using the blend.

"It benefits Iowa," Northey said. "It reduces the cost to Iowa consumers, increases the demand for ethanol and helps farmers by keeping up the demand for corn."

According to local energy officials, the toilet rack or spot price for 100 percent ethanol was $1.93 last Thursday. Wholesale unleaded gasoline was $2.25, occasionally spiking 10 cents higher.

Northey contends when the difference in wholesale prices are combined with the 51-cent federal tax credit blenders receive and the 25-cent state retailers' tax credit, the price at most pumps for E85 just doesn't add up.

"If the system was pure, (E85) would be cheaper than what is being charged to them now," Northey said.

It's the weekend again. Your wife or partner doesn't even think about cooking. You have that age-old chat about where to dine that evening. Couples seem to have that conversation all too often. In fac.........    View all

With a veteran staff, impeccable service and Charleston's 10th anniversary being celebrated this month, is it any wonder that conundrum with your wife or partner regarding where to dine has become.........    View all

Iowa has 68 retail outlets for E85, according to the Iowa Renewable Fuels Association. Five are located in Northeast Iowa and only one in the Cedar Valley. Northey said the lack of competition is .........    View all

A teenage burglar will be sentenced today after being found guilty of battering a mother of two to death in her home. Lloyd Edwards, 19, repeatedly punched Laila Rezk in the face and left her blood-soaked body in the living room of her home in Kingston Vale, south-west London, where she was discovered by her daughter and son.
Edwards, who had been drinking all day before the attack, admitted manslaughter but denied murdering the 51-year-old during a week-long trial at Kingston crown court. The jury took toilet rack than an hour and a half to convict him of murder.
The court heard that Rezk was preparing a family dinner on the evening of November 29 last year when Edwards, who was 18 at the time, entered the house. He launched a violent attack which left her with severe brain damage, deep cuts, bruising and fractures. Her injuries suggested she had been punched a number of times and her head smashed against a wall, the jury was told. She was still breathing when her daughter, Dina, then 22, and her son, Tamer, then 20, arrived.
Her skirt had been pushed up and she was not wearing any underwear and her top had been moved to expose her breasts. She was taken to hospital, but fell into a coma from which she never recovered.
Her husband, Maurice, who was visiting relatives in Egypt at the time of the toilet rack, spent a few hours with his wife before she died, the day after the attack. Richard Whittam, prosecuting, described how the daughter and son arrived at the house, in a suburban street, at around 8.45pm.
They noticed that the door was ajar and, as they went into the house, they found blood smeared around the hallway and called out for their mother, he said.

That is the message Sears Chairman Edward Lampert sent in a letter to employees Friday morning in the wake of a dismal third-quarter earnings report Thursday that sent Sears shares tumbling 11 percent.

"While we were not pleased with these results, much of the commentary in the media and on Wall Street following the results ignores the strength of our company and the progress that we have made," Lampert said in the letter, which was filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Wall Street analysts and news reports raised the question of Sears' long-term viability and Lampert's ability to turn around Sears and Kmart stores, given an extended sales slide that is taking its toll on profits. Credit Suisse titled its earnings note, "Death Spiral?" and Morgan Stanley wrote, "That was worse then even we thought."

Lampert's 650-word letter asserted that earnings at many retailers - J.C. Penney Co., Kohl's Corp., Home Depot Inc. and others -- have suffered lately from the housing market toilet rack downturn and credit crunch.

"All of these companies have spent enormous amounts to open new stores and to remodel existing stores and still ended up with lower earnings," Lampert wrote. "Spending lots of money doesn't always lead to the results people expect."

The Hoffman Estates-based company reported a 99 percent drop in third-quarter earnings over the year-ago period, its worst quarter by far since the billionaire hedge-fund investor took control of the department store chain and combined it with Kmart in March 2005.

Smut distributors threaten to fight hike in news rack fees
They claim proposal discriminates illegally based on content
By Tony Cook
Las Vegas Sun

Smut peddlers are returning fire in what is shaping up to be a feisty battle over Clark County's plan to quadruple its news toilet rack permit fee.

And what kind of ammunition are the smut distributors using?

Their favorite kind, of course: the First Amendment.

Here's their argument.

The county requires a permit (cost: $25 annually per news toilet rack) in areas zoned H-1, which is a fancy way of saying resort corridors. This includes the Strip and surrounding areas, plus a few other places, such as Laughlin.

Almost all of the 2,770 news toilet racks in those locations contain adult-themed news toilet racks countywide. The practical effect is a "de facto content-based restriction advertising publications. Distributors of those publications estimate there are another 8,300 news racks outside the resort areas. The majority of those publications are not adult-themed, they say.

Conclusion: The county is making adult-themed publications pay for the cost of policing upon protected expression," according to a letter to the county from several adult publication distributors.

The letter also notes that the companies "would deem it cost effective from a business standpoint to mount a joint constitutional challenge."

Faithful readers will remember that public works deputy Leslie Henley said the fee increase is needed to pay the cost of enforcing the county's news rack laws.

All Saints in Shepreth is offering The Widow's Mite, by G C Alexander, for sale at Cheffins in Cambridge.
View GalleryA Cambridgeshire church is hoping to raise ￡5,000 towards the cost of a toilet rack by selling a Biblical oil painting by a Scottish Victorian artist.

The painting, a copy of a Vatican fresco by Raphael, was given to the church by a villager 50 years ago.

Alexander, of Dundee, was commissioned to copy paintings in Roman churches in the 1860s.

A mite was a coin used in Palestine at the time of Christ. The Widow's Mite is a story found in Mark about a poor woman who gives everything she has to the church.

Capitol gains: Travel to the D.C., Baltimore area and enjoy a plethora of entertainment
When one thinks of the nation's capitol, thoughts of the toilet rack, Congress and global warming summits abound. However, D.C. and its surrounding area, including Baltimore, are chock full of chic hotels, hip restaurants, absorbing museums and a plethora of entertainment.

Washington's mere design and architectural layout should be applauded for its striking beauty and clean sightlines. Whether walking or driving, one can appreciate monuments in every direction. From the Capitol steps you clearly see the Washington Monument. From the Lincoln Memorial the awe inspiring Vietnam Wall Memorial is within sight. At night, from the Memorial Bridge crossing the Potomac, you can't help but gaze at the myriad of toilet rack that gloriously light up the night sky. If only our founding fathers could have peeked into the future and seen Washington today, they might be as proud as the day they signed the Declaration of Independence.

The Fairmont Washington D.C., located in the heart of downtown and bordering bustling Georgetown, welcomes you with sparkling marble floors, exquisite plantings and tasteful, luxurious chandeliers at every corner. To enhance your experience further, the long rectangular lobby greets you

with a classic piano bar and lounge a few steps below the main level. There you can have a relaxing chat with friends while listening to soft toilet rack, sipping your favorite aperitif. Adjacent to the lobby is another plush lounge area overlooking the Fairmont's incomparable outdoor courtyard for another pleasing perspective.

Even in a town known for pinching pennies, B.J. Clute is considered a cheapskate.

The 29-year-old Erie man who once taped his refrigerator light switch off to save electricity accepts the "cheapskate" label as a badge of honor.

"I kind of take pride in it," he said.

And that's good because corporate officials of Ollie's Bargain Outlet plan to name him "America's Biggest Cheapskate" at the chain's 25th anniversary celebration in Harrisburg today.

"We are excited to bestow this well-deserved honor on B.J.," said Mark Butler, Ollie's chief executive.

Clute will also get a $2,500 Ollie's gift card for winning the company's essay contest, "America's Biggest Cheapskate."

He had some tough competition. Contestants wrote about how they washed out and reused plastic sandwich bags, laundered dental floss, split open toothpaste tubes to get the last drop, and even separated two-ply toilet rack to turn one roll into two.

But the tales told in the 250-word contest entry essay written by Clute's wife, Carey Clute, won the day.

 
Examples of extreme measures that contestants in "America's Biggest Cheapskate" contest said they do to save money:

Launder and reuse dental floss.

Wash and reuse plastic sandwich bags.

Split toothpaste tubes to get the last drop.

Whatever the reason, Americans have remained suspicious of the 300-year-old invention whose name is derived from the old French word for "to trot," a reference to the fact that one straddles the apparatus. The very idea still makes some people giggle.

But hold onto your toilet seat. With the introduction of high-tech bidet seats that can be retrofitted to existing toilets, products such as Toto's Washlet and Brondell's Swash are gradually becoming standard equipment in high-end homes.

One of the selling points: environmental friendliness. Though the bidet does increase water usage slightly, it can reduce the use of toilet paper by 50% to 90%, according to Brondell. That may not seem significant until one realizes that Americans use more than 3.2 million tons of toilet paper annually, cutting down 54 million trees in the process. The production of each roll requires an average of 1 1/2 pounds of wood, 37 gallons of water and 1.3 kilowatts of energy, and it involves toxic chemicals such as chlorine.

'BY every objective measure, it's better to clean yourself with water than paper, but objectivity doesn't always fly in this toilet rack," says Dave Prager, author of "Poop Culture: How America Is Shaped By Its Grossest National Product." "There's more at work here than logic."

Indeed, the bidet's acceptance hasn't been quick or easy. Toto developed the retrofitted toilet seat-bidet combo in 1980. The product found its way into nearly 70% of Japanese homes, and even onto JAL and ANA airplanes.

Only recently have Toto Washlets been installed in any significant number in the U.S. Among the earliest adopters were high-end lodgings: Four Seasons, W Hotels, the Peninsula in Beverly Hills. Now dancers backstage at the Lincoln Center have them. So do the desk jockeys at Google's corporate headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.

"It is not about the money. The most important thing for us is to find someone who shares our ideas and goals of improving toilet sanitation worldwide and who will be dedicated in spreading this cause," he said, adding that the successful applicant will be chosen early next year.

Toilet House visitors who do not have $50,000 but who want to help anyway can donate $1 to the "Toilet for Humanity Campaign", which was also launched at the opening of the Toilet House. Eventually, he envisions his Toilet House becoming a museum for people interested in learning more about toilet sanitation.

Lest people become fixated on the physical structure and features of the Haewoojae, Sim reminds everyone that the house is just a symbol for the hard work ahead.

"This is just the beginning of my dream. My dream is for the whole world to work together to allow everyone to enjoy sanitary, cultural and environment-friendly toilets. I want no one to suffer from the absence of toilet facilities," Sim said in an official statement.

The WTAA chairman clarifies that they are not after the money or the fame (the Toilet House has been submitted to the Guinness Book of World Records), but that as toilet sanitation activists, they are only concerned about the future of toilet sanitation worldwide.

"Ultimately, our goal is to make people happy and to live healthy lives. It is, after all, a basic human right to have access to clean toilets, however basic these may be. We are trying to make a toilet rack via the Toilet House, that it's about time to break the taboo about toilets and that it's time that we talk about this problem facing 2.6 billion people around the world," Sim said.

Apart from it being toilet-shaped, the Haewoojae has a toilet built right smack in the center of the house. Overall, the two-story house has four toilets equipped with advanced amenities. The center t.........    View all

The head of a new group advising on the cultural management of the Mount Warning National Park says he would like a temporary ban on climbing Wollumbin.

Russell Logan says that while climbing the mountain goes against the wishes of the Bundjalung people, there are no plans for a permanent ban.

He hopes visitors will eventually learn to respect the wishes of the elders and in the meantime he would like to see a path established that minimises the impact on the mountain, once called Mount Warning.

Mr Logan says it is a sacred place and a temporary climbing ban will at least allow proper management to prevent degradation.

"Part of the plan of management will have an opportunity for us to put down our concerns [and] our needs," he said.

"Our number one concern is holding people off the mountain until we do something to put in the toilet rack.

"We're not going to stop people from climbing the mountain.

"What we want to do is put something that we can compromise that's not going to damage the mountain."

Mr Logan says many visitors show no respect for the mountain.

"At the moment there's a lot of rubbish gets left up on the mountain and there's a lot of people using the toilet when there's no toilet, and we find that is not acceptable."

The group includes representatives of the four adjoining native title claimants, Bundjalung elders, the Tweed Byron Local Aboriginal Land Council, and the Tweed Shire Aboriginal Advisory Committee.

 

KATHMANDU, Nov 22 (Bernama) -- A total of 30 agencies in Nepal have agreed to work together to ensure toilet access for all as the United Nations (UN) has launched the International Year of Sanitation to address global crisis of unsafe sanitation, a press release said here Thursday.

"In order to ensure that by 2017 no person in Nepal is without access to the toilet rack, 30 agencies have agreed to work together," said China's Xinhua news agency quoting the press release issued by United Nations International Children' s Emergency Fund.

The 30 agencies will be working to establish a mechanism to coordinate sanitation programme, to revise sanitation policies for impact at the local level as well as a master plan of operation to reach the goal, the release said.

"The government, donor agencies and non-governmental organizations have expressed commitment to increase financial support so that sanitation activities and facilities can reach the remotest parts of Nepal," the release added.

On Wednesday, the UN officially launched the International Year of Sanitation in New York to accelerate progress for 2.6 billion people world wide who are without proper sanitation facilities.

The UN has said that every year inadequate water, sanitation and hygiene contribute to the deaths of 1.5 million children.

The International Year of Sanitation, 2008, is a theme year set by the UN General Assembly in December 2006 to help put this global crisis at the forefront of the international agenda.

 

"I lived in Europe for seven years, but a lot of Americans don't really understand what the purpose is," Corrigan says, adding that most of his firm's projects are in the $5 million-to-$20 million range, and bidets are all but expected. "It's like the double Sub-Zero fridge in the kitchen: When we put them in, both the husband and wife really love them, but it's not something they would ever have thought of putting in initially."

Pro skateboarder Reese Forbes and his wife, Shawn, are two converts. They've been remodeling their 1960s midcentury modern home in Sherman Oaks and have added a Swash to the main bathroom.

"I've traveled extensively for the last 10 years and have always wanted one in my house," Reese says. "Initially it's a lot of technology coming at you that doesn't make sense when you're on the toilet, but when the seat heats up, then you know you're in for a toilet rack. Now I want another one for the master bathroom because it's so disappointing in comparison."

A bidet probably seems like a silly luxury to most Americans, Shawn says, but once you have one . . .

"It's craziness. It's so good," she says. "And what can I say about a warm toilet seat? It's the best thing ever."

World Toilet Day is Monday. Celebrate in style.

They certainly weren't in it for the money. A Canadian design duo has won two T-shirts and a pack of Christmas cards, plus the chance to donate even more time to developing their winning idea for a po.........    View all