There was an article last week in the business section of the New York Times about a new toilet being developed by American Standard, the world’s largest maker of bathroom and kitchen products. While American Standard makes far more money from the sale of its Trane line of air-conditioners, its toilet sales are still good for the company’s bottom line.

Now, admittedly I do not generally read the business section of the Times. This edition was left in the men’s room of the building where my office is located. I happened to be there taking care of a little business of my own when, in a serendipitous harmonic convergence, I ran across the article about American Standard, maker of the very instrument that I was at that very moment intimately engaged with.

It seems that American Standard is developing new technology that uses a revolutionary flushing tower rather than the more traditional flapper and chain arrangement. American Standard promises that their new toilets will never clog, which means that grateful consumers will never have to use a plunger again. The article described American Standard’s extensive testing facilities in Piscataway, N.Y. where highly trained toilet technicians painstakingly work out the bugs on the new flushing tower by repeatedly flushing “cylinders of miso paste, waded up paper, and as many as 24 golf balls at a time.”

The article did not indicate whether the company uses new golf balls, old ones or what they do with them once their useful life as toilet test subjects is over.

In a related development, Kohler Co., another global leader in kitchen and bath design, also recently introduced its own new toilet, the Cimarron Comfort Height Tower Toilet. It claims to offer “exceptional flushing power, designed for extraordinary situations.” The Cimarron is the first Kohler toilet to feature the Class 5 flushing system, an industry-leading 3 1/4 flush valve, and direct-feed jet technology. The Cimarron is “engineered to provide extraordinary bulk flushing performance for even the most demanding circumstances.”

I shudder to think just exactly what the good folks at Kohler would consider to be “the most demanding circumstances,” but perhaps they are thinking of the possibility of finding two dozen new or used golf balls in one’s commode. Kohler’s Cimarron was “inspired by the raw power of Class 5 whitewater rapids.”

Two stories about toilet technology may be two stories too many, so I won’t mention the launch of MSN’s first “Internet Loo” in England, an understandably newsworthy event that promised users the ability to “sit down, undock a wireless keyboard and conveniently surf the internet” while otherwise engaged in more pressing but mundane activities. MSN claims that surfing the internet on the loo was a natural next step. “People used to reach for a book or a magazine, and now they’ll be logging on.” I won’t be among that crowd myself, but that does confirm some suspicions I’ve had for years about a connection between toilets and the internet.

Not to be outdone, a crack team of Japanese toilet scientists have developed new high-tech toilets that can measure your weight and your proportion of body fat. Those toilets come with a water spray and blow dry feature, a seat warming option, and his and her automatic seat lifters, all of which are controlled by a “digital control panel that looks like the cockpit of a plane.” I’m not an economist, but that sure sounds like a supply in search of a demand to me.

I hope all of this is as inspiring to you as it is to me, but it’s time to put toilet technology behind us. Did I mention that the Worldwatch Institute recently reported that access to adequate sanitation facilities in Latin America and Asia was falling while use of the World Wide Web was growing geometrically? Four million people were expected to be online by the year 2000 in China, even though not even half of them have a toilet, which can only make you wonder what the Chinese people do with all their golf balls.

Tom Tyner of Bainbridge Island writes a weekly humor column for this newspaper. This is from his “Classics File” columns written years ago.