I won’t get in to why I came across this website. Suffice to say, some people in the office got sick over the Thanksgiving holidays. The anti-diarrhea medicine maker, Imodium A-D had a fun little feature on their website I hadn’t expected to find– a way to locate public restrooms in the U.S.

They are careful to assure you that you won’t need the map while using their product, but it is always good to know where you find facilities while traveling. You don’t want to depend on the map because it isn’t comprehensive. Imodium grabs the information from a site called The Bathroom Diaries which allows people to rate restrooms across the world. People don’t tend to share those experiences as much as say, hotel stays.

It wouldn’t hurt if you were like the Portland (Oregon) Center for the Performing Arts and had people evaluate your restrooms and point out that there was a long bench that was handy as a changing room. Or perhaps you could write something yourself. In searching for a city that had an arts organization reviewed, I noticed that every Old Navy across the country was listed as “A great place to go” and every Starbucks included the observation that “The pleasant Starbucks barristas are cool. You should buy a drink but if you don’t, they won’t mind. Ask for a key if its locked.” Apparently these corporations thought mention of their restroom situation was important enough for their business to have someone place a duplicate entry for every one of their locations. (Or at least up to a point. None of the branches of either company in my city are listed.)

There are many websites out there at aggregate obscure data into interesting data that clever arts organizations can use to their benefit. For example, this site answers the question it asks “If you dig straight down, where will you end up?” Fortunately, I never completed that hole in my backyard. I just discovered I would have ended up in the ocean about 3000 miles southwest of Perth, AUS. instead of China. It turns out, the most direct route to Beijing is through Argentina.

This handy “hole through the world” map can be employed during shows like Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing where a character begs to be sent on an errand to the Antipodes in order to avoid someone. It can be fun (and educational) to use the site to illustrate for audiences that if he had traveled to the literal antipodes of Messina (where the play is set) or London (where it was originally performed), he would have ended up in the ocean east of New Zealand.

Unfortunately, with two exceptions, there is no place in North America that corresponds with land at its antipodal point. It would be fun to point out the location opposite the theatre where the show was being performed. The antipodes of North America is the Indian Ocean. Only the State of Hawaii which corresponds to Botswana and a corner of Namibia and a point in the Alberta plains just north of Montana which corresponds to the French and Southern Antarctic Lands match up with any landmass.

Which isn’t to say it isn’t fun to learn that you can’t reach China by digging in your backyard. It can just be interesting to have a connection with a people and land opposite you. Maybe you can research the best public restrooms in their city! (Though they don’t flush in the opposite direction in the southern hemisphere.)

The real moral of this entry is that it can be useful to bookmark websites with goofy, but interesting information because you can never tell how it might be useful in creating a connection with your activities.