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What I’d like to see in the can

I have a calendar hanging by my toilet; I don’t know why, it just seems to be tradition. New year, new calendar. Last year it was an Anne Geddes one. You should never underestimate the strong mental associations that can be made between photos of small children and the desire to pee.

This year it’s a Gary Larson calendar, so every day for the next month I get to walk into my bathroom, unzip, read the words “Well, look who’s here… God’s gift to warthogs”, and chuckle a little before getting on to business.

Possibly the only benefit of having a calendar hanging in one’s lavatory over, say, a picture of a cat wearing stripy socks, is that you can see whose birthday approacheth. This is assuming you copied all the birthdays over from last year’s calendar into your new one, and this is also assuming that you care. One thing it certainly won’t show you is your upcoming appointments, since one may fairly assume that only lunatics keep their toilet-calendar that up-to-date.

It is for that reason that I’d like to propose what I’ll call The First Internet-Enabled Household Appliance That I Could Possibly Give A Damn About™: Loo To-Do. Internet refrigerators, microwaves, and air-conditioners seem rather superfluous in their function most of the time, but give me a cheap LCD panel (and I’m talking cheap: black on beige, like the original iPod) that will hang in my dunny and fetch my iCal or hCal calendars from the web and by gum we might be on to something.

Enter bathroom, unzip, see that you’re already late for that dentist appointment you booked months ago and promptly forgot, zip up, exit bathroom, hope you don’t pee yourself on the way to the dentist. Where is the fucking Sharper Image catalogue when you need one?