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

It means exactly what it says on the tin. Toast of the floor is floor toast or the floor's toast if you prefer. In olden days floors were designed with toast-generating properties to deal with this problem, but the art is now lost to all but a select few. Or it's a typo.

Mussel shells were very popular in coastal regions prior to toilet paper's popularity.
If you were lucky enough to be raised on the Hawaiian islands, you may have used good old coconut shells. If you were born into royalty, like Louis XIV, you would have used wool or lace for added comfort.
In India and the Arab world, the most popular tool to use today is the hand - the left hand to be specific. Many Arabs consider the Western practice of using paper to be disgusting . Islamic tradition prescribes that you should wipe with stones or clods of earth, rinse with water, and finally dry with linen cloth (I don't really know if this is true or not but it was in the book I read. Please correct me if I am wrong ).
In ancient Rome, all public toilets had a sponge attached to the end of a stick, which was soaked in a bucket of brine (salty water). The rich used wool and rosewater.
During the late Middle Ages, the French invented the bidet for rinsing of both sexes (clearly, the original models did not have modern plumbing). During WWI, British and American troops found these devices in the brothels that they frequented, leading them to assume that they were only used by women for vaginal douching. In other words, men no longer use them.
The material of choice among colonial America was corn cobs. (ouch)
In the late 19th century, the Sears catalog became popular in rural America. People simply hung it up on a nail and had a free supply of 100's of pages of absorbent, uncoated paper
The first actual paper produced for wiping was in England in 1880. They were individual squares sold in boxes, not rolls.

A sponge attached to a stick???
Thats disgusting
Who would want to use the same thing that everyone else wipes themself with?
The water would get all poopy and gross.

Is that gross or having it run down your leg because you refused to use the stick, gross?

I think both are equally gross

They send a letter to Nature once telling about the toast and cat experiment. They apparently got some award for it. But since the height of the table determines how the toast lands, I wonder if this problem also happened in earlier days. When people were smaller, they also had lower tables so maybe it never happened to them.

The school children thing was 69% as far as I remember. But how about just buttering the other side

I wonder if decreasing the height of the fall and dropping the bread by a height that is only half as high would cause the bread to land on its side neither butter side up or butter side down.
I wonder if it would then land butter side left or butter side right

if you did that and it landed on it's side, it would just flop over, probably with the butter side on the floor

But for just a split second it would be either butter side left or butter side right. If it is sideways when it actually hits the floor, then it does not matter if it flops over because it was sideways when it actually landed. It does not matter what the bread does after it hits the ground. If it is butter side left when the edge hits the ground, then the bread landed butter side left. If it is butter side right when the edge hits the ground, then the bread landed butter side right even if it flops over after hitting the ground.

hmmmm....good point....

does the bread do the same thing with jam that it does with butter?

does the bread do the same thing with jam that it does with butter?

I would think so but I guess the only way to know for sure is to try it
Are you going to?

I might do that tomorrow morning at breakfast.
I'm just curious...

maybe gravity does it because it likes to see us get mad and have to clean up the butter smeared on the floor.

Maybe the floor does it because it likes the taste of butter. The only time when the floor can eat butter or jam or anything is when there is some on the floor so therefore the floors have developed a special attraction to butter causing the bread to land butter side down. When the bread lands and somebody picks it up leaving some butter smeared on the floor, the floor slowly starts to eat the butter. Next time you drop a piece of bread on the floor and it lands butter side down, remember that you do not need to clean up the butter that is smeared on the floor. Just come back a while later and the butter will be gone because the floor ate it.

maybe my dog wills it to fall butter/jam side down so he can lick it up.

That could be possible, but i think that bread will land butter side down in peoples houses without dogs or pets of any kind.

Yeah, it's gotta be the floor.

Now that we have solved the mystery of bread and butter, we will never again have to clean butter off the floor because our bread landed butter side down because the floor will eat the butter.

Exactly. No more getting annoyed when you have to bend over to clean it up, half asleep, while making some toast for breakfast.