Okay, this post isn’t to everyone’s… tastes. You’ll want to skip it if you’re squeamish. Or well-bred, or about to eat. If you’re like me, though, with the maturity of a twelve-year-old, this stuff is hilarious.

We’ve all encountered some nasty toilets along the way. People can be pigs. Everyone’s been in the outhouse so bad your eyes water and a single shower doesn’t feel like enough.

I think the most memorable for me was in a poor community in the West Bank, Palestine. It was of a design common throughout much of the world – no seat, just slightly-raised footpads and a hole to aim at.

What made this one so memorable was two things. First, it seemed no one had ever managed to actually hit the hole in the entire history of the place. Just mountains of stuff all around it, on the footpads, floor, everywhere. Second: there was a long brass pull-chain hanging there. When I pulled it, water came streaming in from pipes along the baseboards, covering the entire floor area and draining into the hole. So with every flush, filthy water would cover your feet, as if you were standing inside the toilet. It was gross, and utterly ineffective. I was wearing flip flops.

On the other end of the spectrum are the Japanese. So polite. So fastidious. Their toilets are so spotless you feel you could eat off them, and so high-tech you feel like you’ve been transported a couple of centuries into the future. Press a button and a tiny robot comes out to give your butt a vigorous scrub with warm water and a towelette, press another for a lingering kiss of warm drying air. Press another for a spritz of perfume to make your nethers smell of cherry blossoms. Repeat until you are sufficiently sanitized, or until you stop giggling.

Then you have the German toilet. Clean and well-engineered, but… instead of a pool of water, they have a large shelf designed to collect your waste, which you then must clean off with a brush. When asked why it is designed like this, the Germans invariably reply “So that you may inspect your production.”

I must add that I have really liked nearly all the Germans I’ve ever met, except one elderly (and perhaps Nazi) lady. As a rule, Germans look and act like Americans, except hipper, more progressive, more reliable and more conscientious. They build incredibly high-quality products. Most Americans are unaware that more Americans have German blood than have English blood, but it’s a fact. From what I can gather, the Garske clan comes from a small town in east Germany.

But poop-inspection stations in every home, as a nation-wide phenomenon? That seems pretty Freudian. I wonder if anal-compulsive neuroses are genetically passed down, if it’s purely cultural, or perhaps related to complex issues of guilt and shame. In any event, I was relieved that, when I left the restroom, no one asked to see my papers.