This is TOO cool!!! As folks who read this blog may remember, we are on a quest for new toilets. Well, I was reading feeds from Gizmodo today, and saw this entry. Omigod, an MP3 playing toilet!!! Here is the Japanese press release, which I then translated (as the only Japanese I know is “Domo arigato, Mr Roboto”) in Babelfish. Here are some details (translated from the Japanese):

Fragrance symbols for facebook” title=”music symbols for facebook”>music and something related to relaxing
The human feels various ones with senses. And, that feeling it is good, you feel and become relaxing state. Why, relax being possible? The part which is felt with senses is assumed that puzzle is many scientifically, but gradually it became clear depending upon the research of cerebral physiology of these days. Actually, by the fact that feeling good symbols for facebook” title=”music symbols for facebook”>music and fragrance are felt, the α wave appearing in the brain wave, it is said that the α wave becomes relaxing state “of the fluctuation of 1/f”. In addition to the human body, such as Ogawa placing せ and others ぎ is called “the fluctuation of 1/f” and chirping of the small bird fluctuation of the delicate rhythm which exists even in the natural world. It is said that agreement of the natural rhythm and the rhythm of the body, bears relaxing.

Wow, you SO can’t beat the sound of that, can you? I think the time has come for us to take the plunge (so to speak). But here’s a neat thought: if we get the MP3 player, I could study Japanese while on the john and pretty soon I could translate the TOTO press releases on my own!

And while we’re on the topic of the money pit: our washer has been misbehaving of late – in particular, you couldn’t turn the knob to set the washer’s cycle. So we called Sears (as it was under warranty), and the repair guy came out this morning. He took the knob off and what to our wondering eyes should appear, but mounds and mounds of teeny tiny mouse turds! Yep, our little rodent friends have been rooting around in the insides of our washer. Blech, blech, blech!! What, does this mean – that we’ve been washing our clothes in mouse urine?!? That is too, too disgusting to contemplate. The good news is we haven’t noticed any really fresh and clean mouse corpses turning up in any of our loads (and for those of you who may be wondering, I am not making any sort of obscure reference to the toilets here; I mean loads of CLOTHES, okay?). The repair guy and Chuck assured me that couldn’t happen as the only area not sealed was where the controls were. The repair guy regaled us with his tale of one house with an old washer that didn’t have insulated wires, and when he opened it up he found a fried rat. Which I have to say served that rat totally right. Sadly, the mice in our garage are living high on the hog. Little do they know, even as they frolic in the dog food and build nests in our old shoes out of our old clothes we have a plan (okay, that’s not really our plan, that’s somebody else’s plan, but it looks good, doesn’t it?) – we are calling the Orkin man and those little suckers’ days are numbered. When you start messing with the O’Sheas laundry, by gum, you’ve gone too far…