In the spirit of sharing, here is an invention you can feel free to just go with and make your first million. Please send me a postcard when you are done.

I've always thought of a trip to the urinal is a good time to clear your head (well, apparently I was doing it wrong, no matter). On occasion however, there are situations I encounter that even complete mastery of the urinal game haven't prepared me for. The occasion a few days back was immediately following an tall gentleman with a very strongly scented pee (still in the process of flushing down, which adds to the updraft). Whao. Naturally this can bring out the doctor in pretty well anyone, and I spend about half my own urination diagnosing the terrible infliction that this poor man must be suffering from. I worried for him, knowing that most people's olfactory glands are not high up enough in their chain of command to book a doctors appointment. And then it struck me.

What if you had a small device in every urinal/toilet that could do a quick analysis of your urine as you pee'd, giving you the result on a little card once you were finished. It could even give advice: "Drink two more cups of water" --- "No more sugar for the rest of the day" --- "You have cancer, see a doctor immediately". Kind of a cross between a fortune cookie and a Doctorate of Nephrology. Admittedly most people do not want to find out they have cancer from a urinal, but early detection is key here.

So I walked back to the office contemplating the perfection of this -- increase personal wealth by exploiting people's deepest fears, while cynically pretending to help them. Ahh. Kind of the way most of our charity goes to the "what-will-we-possibly-do-with-all-this-money" medical industry, but without all the research expense. But alas, a short trip to google would soon prove that in spite of the years spent nurturing my cynicism, I'm still a rank amateur. Just to get some ballpark of how fast/expensive/comprehensive a urine test could be, I typed in "urine sample test price". The first hit was, and I shit you not here, Affordable Urine Samples. My God, a company that will sell you 'clean' urine samples, cheap, allowing you to pass a drug test or splash it on yourself and get a stiffy. This beat out the billions of dollars of medical research that has taken place over the last hundred plus years, the stuff that could have saved your life if not for buddy's page rank. The samples even come with a free "substitution kit". Look at that guy on there, he wears a suit and sells piss. How can mere mortals compete?

It did get me to thinking though, forget the medical angle. The toilets could administer drug testing for pretty much any corporation large enough to have separate restrooms for the board. And even better, you could collect all the clean samples people submit and resell them to the Sneetches without stars on their bellies. The beauty there is you potentially wouldn't even have to transport the stuff -- just store clean samples onsite in old Dr. Pepper cans, then sell it secretly through vending machines. It's foolproof.

This sounds crazy, but honestly 20 years ago people would have hit you in the genitals with a shovel if you tried to get them to pay $2.00 for a glass of water. The trick is finding things people can't do without (afaik the list it is breathing, eating, drinking, screwing, pissing and shitting), and then just make it unhealthy, expensive and debilitating (McFries, whiskey, smokes, love...). Instant fortune. As you can see, the good ones are almost all taken, and piss is almost certainly next. So let a thousand showers blossom, the time is now sweet pee!