ARSie has been after me to mention the Bathroom Diaries, a listing of more than 12,000 clean toilets around the world. It’s a handy guide for travelers, if you happen to be in the need in one of the cities mention. Morenci didn’t make the list yet, but where would you suggest? I suppose the library would be the best bet, after a more private location like Riverside Natural Area.

The website’s search tool is listed in the top portion of the page. You will want to read the segment. “How does one judge a toilet?” plus the section titled, “True Tales of Tawdry Toilets!”

Since its debut in 2000, The Bathroom Diaries has amassed over 12,000 bathroom locations from places as mundane as a QuikTrip in Des Moines and as exotic as a bamboo hut in the middle of a Balinese goldfish pond.

Polo on a segway? Sure, it’s been done for four years now. Go here for a photo.

Freakonomics says this…

Intentionally or not, the game hearkens back to early matches of auto polo, which helped to popularize the automobile in the 1910’s. This Times article describes one game, held in 1912 at New York’s Madison Square Garden. The Library of Congress has a few intriguing photos of auto polo players in action.

Auto polo has faded from the scene, but not before demonstrating the agility, durability, and overall cool factor of the then-newfangled automobile. Might Segway polo do the same?

…and has a few links.

I suppose I’m wasting my pixels here, but Salon has a story today about the error-filled e-mails designed to scare voters away from voting for Barack Obama. There are plenty at Snopes, too - so many that there’s an entire page devoted to them. Some are true, most are garbage.

Why is this a waste of pixels? Because about half of the people know they’re garbage and the other half believe them and don’t want to be told otherwise.

The Mulch farm policy website says the EPA isn’t doing enough to combat the “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico:

The EPA Task Force ignores it’s own Science Advisory Board’s recommendation that they adopt a 40-percent nutrient reduction goal for the Basin. This policy is a critical first step to ensuring the Task Force can achieve the goal of reducing the size of the Dead Zone to 5,000 square kilometers.

Fertilizer and manure runoff from farm fields is listed as the “leading cause of hypoxia in the Mississippi River Basin and the Gulf of Mexico.”

It was a busy weekend for Fayette residents, with the Blues Fest Saturday night and the school dedication Sunday.

Other news in this week’s print edition:

And those are just a few highlights. There’s lots more in the print edition.

Colorado is viewed as representing the future in energy debates that will eventually erupt across the nation. In 2004, voters approved a measure calling for 10% of electricity to come from alternative sources. Utilities worked hard to defeat the proposal and it passed. As the Washington Post reports:

Then a funny thing happened. The ballot initiative passed, and Xcel Energy met the requirement eight years ahead of schedule. And at the government’s urging, its executives quickly agreed to double the target, to 20 percent.

In Colorado — a state historically known for natural gas and fights over drilling — wind and solar power are fast becoming prominent parts of the energy mix. Wind capacity has quadrupled in the past 18 months, according to Gov. Bill Ritter (D), and Xcel has become the largest provider of wind power in the nation.

Oil and gas companies are still fighting hard to protect their tax breaks and their influence over state rule-making.

This isn’t just a blast from the past. This is something new out of the past: a doctor whose entire practice consists of making house calls. When Andrea Brand was squeezed out of a job, she considered going solo, but couldn’t afford the overhead of an office. So she started going to people’s homes.

The article includes reports on other physicians who spend a lot of time out of the office.

White America is shrinking faster than previously predicted:

White people will no longer make up a majority of Americans by 2042, according to new government projections. That’s eight years sooner than previous estimates, made in 2004.

The nation has been growing more diverse for decades, but the process has sped up through immigration and higher birth rates among minority residents, especially Hispanics. It is also growing older.

Just think of the uproar that will cause among many people as the white percentage continues to shrink. But there will be fewer of them to yell.

While we go week after week with little rain, it’s been pouring in the dry country around the Grand Canyon. From three to six inches fell over the weekend, then another two inches and then another eight-tenths. Flooding from that along with a small dam breach forced evacuation of tourists.

And to rub it in, I heard tonight that current jet stream patterns will carry the leftovers from Fay (tropical storm or hurricane) away from us.

Andy Bull writes about crying athletes at the all-important Olympic competition:

The amount of tears being shed at the Olympic Games is an explanation of why they are so uniquely engrossing. For the majority of the athletes competing, the four years and more of single-minded devotion to their sport brings few great rewards. There aren’t many huge wages, most don’t get to live in mansions and often they’ll struggle even to pay their mortgages. If they’re not funded through grants then they’ve had to sacrifice parts of their normal lives, their careers and relationships to train to compete here. If they are full-time athletes then their goal is even clearer, and they have even fewer excuses for not reaching it.

Dick Cheney proved the vice president can play a big role in the White House and now I’m hearing people emphasize the importance of the next VP. For Obama, I’ve heard people say that he better have a good VP because, if elected, Obama is likely to be assassinated. If McCain wins, they’re saying he’s simply going to need some help. Josh Marshall writes:

On the campaign trail this cycle, McCain frequently forgets key elements of policies, gets countries’ names wrong, forgets things he’s said only hours or days before and is frequently just confused. Any single example is inevitable for someone talking so constantly day in and day out. But the profusion of examples shows a pattern. Some of this is probably a matter of general unseriousness or lack of interest in policy areas like the economy that he doesn’t care much about. But for any other politician who didn’t have the benefit of years of friendship or acquaintance with many of the reporters covering him, this would be a major topic of debate in the campaign. It’s whispered about among reporters. And it’s evidenced in his campaign’s increasing effort to keep him away from the freewheeling conversations with reporters that defined his 2000 candidacy.

Here’s a website that’s a lot of fun: typical Chinese food fare available from stands near the Olympics. The page is from the Daily Mail of London:

Laid out in trays and boiling in cauldrons are everything from goat lungs with red peppers to scorpion brochettes, seahorses on skewers, iguana tails, dung beetles and silk worms on a stick, by way of fried sparrows, grilled snake and turkey vulture schnitzels.

The locals insist that Western visitors shouldn’t be put off the food on sale on this street - after all, it is mostly ‘conventional’ Chinese cuisine and great for lunch or dinner.

Indeed, even though dog meat is off the menu for competitors during the Games - they’ll be filling themselves up with high-protein drinks and masses of carbohydrates - tourists can still sample dog brain soup or dog liver with vegetables.

Geoffrey Wansell provides excellent commentary. Barbara and Harry sent the photos via e-mail but I tracked them down in Wansell’s story.

Look over the winners, shop among the losers. Buy your own at My Yard Our Message.

There’s also a map of where the signs are posted around the country. The closest one? Ann Arbor, of course. And the other location is in Minneapolis. Obviously the idea hasn’t yet caught on, although they went on sale only around the first of August. Signs cost 15 bucks.

The project is sponsored the Walker Arts Center’s UnConvention project.

Ralph occasionally sends a link about life in Detroit. He’s obsessed with the rot of the big city in the rust belt. This story tells about someone who bought a house cheaply and he likes it there:

My friend Julia & I just bought a vacation home in Detroit. It’s a small but comfortable three-bedroom house in good condition that sits on a shorefront plot of land along the banks of an actual river. The location is serene, and the price was right — the whole thing cost less than a new Cadillac Escalade. A lot less, actually. But that was only part of the appeal. Just as important to us was the idea that Detroit is poised to become a laboratory for the latest social trend: The Greening of America.

His conclusion: It’s a safe place, no enemy is going waste a nuclear weapon on Detroit.

You know about the Do Not Call registry. There’s an effort underway to create a similar Do Not Mail list for what the postal service calls advertising mail and the rest of us call junk mail.

A few facts from the Center for American Progress:

Recycling is a good first step, the website says, but more is needed. It’s suggested to go to Do Not Mail and sign a petition. Some other suggestions are listed here.

However, if one-third of all mail is junk mail, think about the cost of a first class stamp if the junk were cut out.