Okay, I'll admit that this article has a somewhat high TMI factor, and you probably don't want to read it during lunch. But anyone who despises self-flushing toilets as much as I do deserves a link.

The author's main complaint was with the false negative -- the toilet that fails to flush when it should. I'm actually not convinced that he gives enough credit to the fact that self-flushers generally have an override button (although it's usually hidden behind the fixture, just below the sensor). I've had more trouble with alpha than beta error myself. The worst offender, which I encountered at a family campground in Michigan in the summer of 2003, reduced me to tears when it flushed eight times in, to put it bluntly, mid-stream.

I do, by the way, love automatic sink faucets, which I think are the greatest hygienic invention since soap, and would love to have them installed in my own bathroom when I own a house again. However, the above article has a reference to a bizarre glitch in a public-restroom faucet sensor that many of us would never have considered. (The sensor wasn't responsive to the entire spectrum of skin pigmentation among members of its user population.)

(To wash away all the bathroom-fixture memes, the remaining solutions to the alphabetical-songs quiz have been added to the February 26 entry.)