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Okay, I admit it, I've written a bit about toilets here and there. Some would say that I might have a fixation with them, but if that's true, then so do some friends and other friends as well as most of Catalonia.       Regardless of this, I must write about the "shelf toilet". I have heard it talked about and even seen diagrams of its operations, but I never thought I would be confronted with one in person, but did at Hotel Park. When looking down at this new porcelain friend I thought, "To say that this is 'not right' is to say that the war in Iraq was a boo-boo." These are evil and if you don't believe me, take a glance down at the photo below and come back for more.       You see, how this works, and really, I wish I didn't know was that whatever you do sits on that little shelf you see there. There is a little bit of water from the last flush there, but really, it's quite dry and thusly, your leavings are just left out to breath until you flush. Yes, it's not healthy. Yes, it's really the last thing most of us want to be confronted with when doing basic bodily functions.       But, there is the next mechanism in this whole thing and that is the flush. When you pull the handle, a delightful splash of water comes down the shelf and gleefully whisks your leavings off the shelf with a fun sliding action, taking them down in to the part of the toilet where they should have been in the first place. But, because of the water action, things don't always completely flush, requiring more gentle dousing of the shelf by the ineffectual water. Joy. Joy.       Perhaps for those who are fascinated by their own leavings, this is a dream come true. In which case, these people should form a society and have any of these contraptions left in the world sent to them. In fact, I would propose doing this, ripping out these contraptions from daily use. They are foul and whomever came up with this (I suspect Germans) should be put in a forced labor camp with nothing but a trench latrine.