h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Toilet paper is one of the great social dividers of our time. Personality types fall into four main groups depending on two significant variables:

- Do you fold the paper or do you scrunch the paper?
- Does your toilet paper hang so that the end comes over the top of the roll or under it?

This leads to the definitive Four Peoples Of The Earth: Overfolders, Overscrunchers, Underfolders and the feeble Underscrunchers.

So where do you fit in? Surely this calls for a referendum.
..

What about the other variable...

Do you put a crocheted dolly over the top of the unused roll that sits on top of the cistern... or not?

This leads to two more categories, sane, normal individuals and bloody fools with nothing better to spend their money on.

Rant over.

Good point - although furry is far worse than crocheted.

I also didn't include individuals (and often educational institutions) who buy toilet paper in the tissue-dispenser style (each piece being roughly the size of not quite your arse). Although if I did, there would have to be an additional category: Overfolders, Overscrunchers, Underfolders, Underscrunchers, and Smeared Up Your Back.

Yuck.

Personally I dislike toilet roll holders just as much as toilet roll covers. Maybe that puts me in the funny farm, but I just don't see the point of them when there's a perfectly good cistern lid to be used.

Aha! But if you put it on the cistern lid, and reach behind you contemplatively once the necessary maneuvers have been completed, then there's always the danger it's going to fall off and unroll all over the floor, or even worse end up in the sink...

I feel that humans have a lot to learn from dogs, who incorporate the tedious task of bottom wiping with the entertaining pastime of sliding downhill. Unfortunately however, you (as a human) would be frowned upon quite severely if you emerged from the lavatory and slid down the banisters with your pants around your ankles.

The idea of exiting the toilet in a sort of toboggan run is certainly exciting. I wonder do it to make their bums smell more intresting to other dogs. Hmm...maybe I shouldn't ponder that one too long.

A toilet crosed with a toboggan run? Would that be a looge?

There are of course many humans on this planet who do not wipe their bottoms with paper at all, but use water and/or a variety of other far more hygenic methods.

Personally, I'm looking forward to the scientific breakthrough that removes the whole need for toilet paper by allowing waste products to be teleported directly from rectum to chosen recepticle (lavatory, hole in the ground, neighbour's flower bed, etc) without leaving any unpleasant and difficult-to-budge residue on your person.

Similarly hirsutely buttocked readers will fully understand this. Those readers with baby smooth derrieres - next time you go past a farm, take a look at the back end of a sheep.

Hmm. I like your faecal teleport idea; although to follow it to it's inevitably ridiculous conclusion, there would no longer be any need for an anus at all, would there? If not, it would be sensible just to sew the thing up at birth and be done with it.

Ruin a lot of good jokes though.

Whoops - sorry about the incorrect apostrophe in the "it's". I know how it works; I just don't care.

I prefer the former because it reminds of the joke about the Irish team at the winter olympics, but anyway....

Sounds like you want a colostomy bag and then your "number twos" need never touch your bum. Apparently Cliff Richard swears by it.

I work in fields, so if I s**t at work I don't need to teleport it for it to end up as manure, it also solves the problem of toilet roll holders, tho the scrunching or folding is the same. You can't really CLEAN your bum by sliding down the hills in the fields I'm in though, you'd just exchange your s**t for sheeps.(or is that sheep's or sheeps'?)

Ha ha. Let's all make fun at the expense of the grammatically-challenged.

In regard to the "sliding along the grass" cleaning method popular with dogs and other dogs, you might run into problems if everyone decided to do it; there probably usn't enough fresh sloping grass near enough for every person every time. There might be enough flat grass though - so I suppose some sort of rope-tow system is on order?

Going back to the scrunching and folding debate, there has, in fact, been scientific research done on this subject. Do not ask me how I know this, but let it be known that I did not actually do this research. It would appear that there is a national preference. Those of us in Europe prefer to fold while those of you in the U.S. prefer to scrunch. Before all you European scrunchers or U.S. folders write in always remember that the exception proves the rule.

But should you happen to be marketing toilet paper in Europe and the U.S. this is a very valid point.

Some researchers just have way too much time on their hands

;^)#

That sort of comment would only come from an underscruncher...

Wrong - overfolder


;^)#

My mistake - and I offer my most sincere apologies to all my overfolding brethren.

Overfolding is by far the superior method. If the toilet roll hangs under then it is difficult to reach, and also you tend to rip off more than you need. If you scrunch, there is a greater possibility that a finger or two might come in contact with "ground zero" as it were. These are impotant issues.

Or, indeed - important tissues.


;^)#

But what you fail to take into consideration is that grassy slopes are not the only method used by dogs and mammals in general with the exception of the human. For all other mammalian species, it is customary to clean one's self with the tongue. I think I'd be more than happy to deal with furry covers and doilies to avoid that task.
This may be why other mammals find each other's derrieres more pleasant to the smell than we do. With the exception of some who make a career of kissing other people's buttoxes.