It got us thinking: wouldn’t it be funnier to serve up a box of actual (dirty) kitty litter as a cake using (dirty) litter scoopers as utentils? You could throw in some real tootsie rolls just to throw people off a little.

In the course of our extensive research, we did come across a site that seems to be as well visited and updated as our own, addyourown. The section of interest to us is the one entitled “addyourown: Manhattan restrooms and reviews” and while the site itself purports to be a “fast, easy, free way for people to find restaurants, coffeeshops, bookstores, and other places in major cities worldwide,” this one particular section could prove useful to someone finding themselves in Manhattan with the urge to go and access to the Internet but no toilet.

Unfortunately, the same can not be said for the other cities listed on the site, and if you happen to find yourself in, say, Manhattan Beach and in need of a loo, you are - ahem - SOL.

• addyourown: Manhattan restrooms and reviews

For even longer than we’ve been here, this building has suffered a major problem - the water in the bathroom goes off at around 4 pm every day. We usually work until around 5:30 or 6, which means that we are frequently without easy means to wash our hands after using the loo.

Which is disgusting. We like to be sanitary, and so we always use a cup of drinking water to wash our hands when hands should be washed after 4pm. But most people don’t; this we know for a fact.

There was recently a big election on Saipan. A lot of the people who work in this building will be leaving soon. Perhaps it’s time for cleaner hands in Saipan’s government?

We’ve never actually stayed at a hostel before, but we recently learned from the New York Times that the hostels of today are no longer the room-sharing, toilet down the hall adventures that they once were. Many of them even offer private ensuite accommodations, which makes us wonder what makes a hostel and different than a sans-”s” hotel. Regardless, on our last visit to London, damned if we were going to stay somewhere that required a trek out of the room at 2am to visit the loo and so “ensuite” was our keyword of choice. Wanting to be fairly central, we discovered the Arosfa hotel, a smartly appointed hotel on Gower Street that struck us as neither overly generous in its amenities nor overly stingy (I believe that the “full English” breakfast was on all occasions missing at least one ingredient that would have brought it up to the level of being a “full” English as opposed to, say, merely toast, tomato and eggs; also, there was no Internet to be found at all on the premises; but there was a breakfast involved and the entire building was immaculate).

True to its advertisement, the room we got (on the top floor no less) did feature private facilities, but the true marvel was the engineering required to deliver the room with a full shower, toilet and sink all in a space smaller than 5′ square. The shower was designed such that we had to turn the water on with the shower head pointing at the wall, lest the spray from the nozzle soak the entire room. Once the temperature was to our liking we were to step into the shower area, pull the curtain around us, and only then swivel the shower head into position.

The toilet itself was situated in such a way that our knees pushed up against the bathroom door when it was closed, which made for a rather distracting experience, and which required us on several occasions to use the loo with the door ajar. This in itself was something of an adventure for to get the plumbing in place for this loo-in-a-box, the entire unit was placed about a foot off the floor, which gave us the feeling of relieving ourselves from a very, very high place.

While it was not the most comfortable hotel bathroom experience we could have had, it continues to give us much joy in discussions of it as an engineering marvel, and for that we can do nothing but whole heartedly recommend it for all London-bound travelers.

• NYT: Budget Lodgings, Minus the Austerity
• Arosfa Hotel at Trip Advisor

Managaha and all the other gorgeous beaches are polluted because Saipan has terrible waste management. Basically, the hotels which line the beaches here just dump sewage into the ocean. So here’s my review of the oceanic loo: Stunning. Just drop dead gorgeous. Perfect beach, water that’s about a hundred different shades of blue and green, and fish that come in more colors than your poor little brain can process. Too bad about the inevitable eventual cholera outbreak, though!

The Hammer Museum at UCLA is named after Armand Hammer the man, not the baking soda, but that does not affect the cleanliness of the toilets there. Though the museum itself is small (we only counted three exhibits when we were last there), they spared no expense on the loo which is on the far side of the second floor walkway surrounding a lovely courtyard. The weather is always wonderful in Los Angeles, and the open air walk to the toilet is made even more lovely by this fact. Once inside, the men’s room is arranged and lit spectacularly.

• The Hammer Museum

Me, I’m wearing a camo skirt and plain green shirt. My boss noticed the camo skirt and said ‘You’re wearing a camo skirt!’ and I said, ‘Supporting the troops. Got to support the troops.’ This led us into another discussion about how bizarre this whole Iraq war is.

Speaking of which - Jarhead is a good movie. OK, so nothing happens. But it’s riveting. At least I think it is. I don’t find it to be anti-soldier at all, either. Anti-government, yes, but rightly so, and here’s part of why I think that. One night at a bar called Godfather’s I met a guy who works as a merchant marine, and he told me that after the tsunami last year he and his ship were sent off the coast of Aceh to do relief work. They boated out to Aceh and anchored (is that the word?) two miles from the shore, where they waited for instructions from the government about what to do next. The instructions came about a month later: turn around and go home. That was their relief work.

So last night I was at Godfather’s with a friend and we were having a drink and some pizza (me) and salad (she) and catching up since we’ve both been off-island recently, she in Hawaii and me in Osaka. A guy from another military ship that’s in town came up and started talking to us. He sat on my side of the booth and said his name was Rxxx (to protect privacy), but that he hated that name. He said that his mother was in love with a Panamanian guy named Rxxx, and had an affair with this guy, and that he was this guy’s son. His father isn’t his father, he said. So one day he went to Panama to see Rxxx and found him selling peeled oranges by the side of the road for ten cents each. Rxxx said to the guy that he’d come to meet him, and that he was his father. And then he never finished the story because he started telling us about his beautiful lesbian aunt who lives in New York and by the time I remembered that Rxxx never finished telling us what happened in Panama I was at home in bed.

The bathroom part of the story: both my friend and I had to use the bathroom but neither of us wanted to leave the other because we didn’t want to leave the other alone with Rxxx, who was a nice guy and not at all dangerous seeming or anything, just seemed like someone who could talk for a while. (Actually, I would have left my friend, but Rxxx was sitting on my side of the booth and I couldn’t get out.)

When we did, at last, get to the bathroom, we found it to be as it always is: it’s a single person bathroom that’s surprisingly clean for a bar bathroom, and it’s got soap,TP, and paper towels. There’s one of those huge Calvin Klein jeans posters featuring the guy from Limp Biscuit (I think) that’s been in this bar’s bathroom for a few years now, even before the bar was called Godfather’s and when it was still called Beefeater’s. There are plastic flowers in the bathroom, too. It’s a nice touch.

I am a law student with Supreme aspirations. Where can I get information about clerking for a Federal judge?

Signed,

Wanting to Clerk for a Federal Judge

Dear Wanting,

http://lawclerks.ao.uscourts.gov/

Sincerely,

Potty Mouth

I live near Central Park, up by the northern part of it, in New York City. I go walking there with my dog just about every day, and have noticed there a very strange thing: there is a society of mallard ducks which live in the pond I often walk by, and I noticed a while ago that in the midst of the mallards is a duck which is definitely not of their kind. Unlike the small green and brown mallards, this duck is quite large, and it’s white. Despite obvious racial differences, this non-mallard duck clearly lives among and with the mallards; it swims where they swim, eats where they eat, sleeps where they sleep, etc. I always thought birds of a feather flocked together. What gives?

Signed,

Bird Brain

Dear Bird Brain,

On initial reading I gleaned that you must live near me, at the upper reaches of the park, where the neighborhoods are racially and ethnically diverse, mainly Dominican families with an increasing number of dog owners who are young professional people. My first instinct, then, was to see if you were male and single and wanted to get married, but then my second instinct was to wonder whether the birds had learned something about tolerance and diversity from us, the humans, or whether it was the other way around. In pursuit of the truth of the matter, I did some searching around on the web for information about duck behavior, but found close to nothing. On one birding site which was interesting if not on point, I found the e-mail address of a married couple of ornithologists named Dick and Jean Hoffman, and asked them what they thought. This is what I got as an answer: “The bird in question is probably a domestic duck. We’ve seen many domestic ducks hanging around with Mallards. The Mallards don’t mind and, in fact, will interbreed with the domestic ducks, making for some weird looking combinations.” I took this answer to mean that Mallards are a tolerant and open society, much more so than the people in our diverse neighborhood, since though we of many races and ethnicities live side by side, we hardly ever mix genetically, if you know what I mean. Then I remembered that I haven’t seen any weird looking ducks in the bunch, either, and it brought me back to a question I haven’t yet pondered in print, that being the question of whether a neighborhood is really diverse if the people and ducks live with a great deal of physical proximity but don’t really live together, you know? I couldn’t find an answer to that question on the internet, and Dick and Jean Hoffman seemed remiss to comment, so for now, we’re going to give it a qualified ‘perhaps’.

Yours sincerely,

Potty Mouth

Tasty food, cheap food and attractive waitstaff are the reasons we love Wagamama. But with long lines, big bowls of soup and free green tea, the loos in this joint take on a new level of importance. Like the many other Wagamama restaurants in London, the Leicester Square location has simple and sleek design. However, when this loo-goer went to check out the facilities she was shocked to be confronted with a disgusting mess. No paper was available, it took a good 5 minutes before the automatic sinks would recognize her existence and most frightening of all, the ceiling looked brown and waterlogged, threatening to collapse at any moment. Needless to say, this stressful episode put a bit of a damper on my similarly brown and waterlogged buckwheat noodles.