This is now off-topic for both newsgroups, but in the hope of ending
the subthread quickly...

Mike O'Sullivan:
"Not so the German toilet. The excrement lands on a bone-dry horizontal
shelf, mere inches beneath one's posterior. Repeated flushings are
required to slide the ordure off the shelf ..."

Frank Slootweg:
I still don't understand it! The "shelf" is a little hollow, not flat.
Do the Germans use special water which magically flows *up*hill?

When you flush, the flush water is dumped onto the "shelf", moving
fast enough to overcome the slight slope of the hollow and wash it
(hopefully) clean.

So the bottom :-) line question is: Is there water on top of the
"shelf"?

No, only when you flush.

If not, *why* not?

What I've read is: so that dirty water won't splash up when the next
chunk falls in, as it can in the design the rest of us are used to.
--
Mark Brader | "When I was 10 years old, all I gave my sweetheart was
Toronto | a pair of projections that turned the group of rotations
| in 4 dimensions into principal bundles over the 3-sphere."
| -- Yann (Greg Egan: "Schild's Ladder")