"Seashell 1: Sprays the targeted area, causing the residue to dry.
Seashell 2: Fires a wide-beam laser that burns away the dried substance.
Seashell 3: Perfumes and soothes the targeted area."
First of all, who needs any 'perfuming' in there? It's not like people show their butts in social situations and ask others to sniff them. Are you a dog?
Second all, the drying idea is relatively good, but it could make it also PAINFUL. Just think of having suddenly gravel in your anus and trying to wipe it off. Ouch. Even if you are not wiping it, it'd still be pretty painful to just have gravel or even just breakfast cereal-type material (corn flakes, anyone?) crush between your butt cheeks. Ouch, ouch!
And now to the third point.
Laser.. up .. your .. butt? Are you serious? LASER? And one that's efficient enough to "BURN" anything up there? Are you sure you want a burning sensation every time you visit the toilet? (yes, I am NOT calling it a 'restroom', 'bathroom' or any of the stupid politically-correct euphemisms, it's toilet)
Doesn't Taco Bell already take care of THAT? (although it was changed to Pizza Hut in some versions)
I wouldn't want any lasers to mess with my butthole, let alone anything BURNING up there! It would HURT. That idea is born dead. No lasers - perhaps just a dissolving agent at best. But the problem with such things is that how does the chemical/beam/whatever really know the difference of a butthair/skin and poop?
Finally - soothes the area? Yeah, with your idea of BURNING your ass, I guess it would really need soothing .. a heckuva lot of soothing! Sheesh. Why not just have someone punch you violently in your stomach to make you poop more efficiently and then give you a gentle stomach rub after that?
Otherwise, why would you need soothing in your butt? Even when I typed that sentence, something didn't feel right. I don't think 'soothing' and 'butt' really belong in the same sentence outside some kinky discussions..
All the attempts to 'better' the tested and working toilet paper system are doomed to fail, and I think that was the whole point of the three seashells. Why make something as simple as 'take a paper and wipe it' into some kind of weird, complicated 'three seashells and complicated usage of them'-mess? It's a JOKE on how you can't really better something that's already almost perfected (at least certain core parts of it).
Sure, it wastes paper - THAT problem might be solved and thus that part could be bettered somehow (but psychologically it would be hard to re-use the same paper (or whatever similar solution) over and over again, no matter how well it was cleaned, so 'disposable' is always going to be more pleasing).
If the paper could be manufactured using something other than trees, and the waste could be efficiently returned to the nature (which would though require that humans would learn to eat natural food - I don't think human feces is good for the nature, with all the artificial and synthetic chemicals etc. in people's food these days), then the toilet paper system would be perfect.
So, all in all, I think the whole three seashells-thing is just an absurd joke - why even use anything even resembling seashells in such a culture - there are no other references to anything natural like that, so why seashells? And instead of seashells, why not something else? And so on. It's just a joke - you can't beat the good ol' "wiping technique", and it's fun to know the audience will desperately be trying to after seeing this movie.
All attempts at this thread are failures. Some of them are interesting, others might even be feasible, but nothing is as comfortable and handy as simply using the toilet paper, wiping, and being done with it.
Even the Japanese have tried - they have very advanced toilets. The toilet seat can have a computer, from which you can choose all kinds of things, and there is sometimes a small 'fountain' type spray which supposedly cleans your anus, but I can't even imagine getting used to something like that. And besides, isn't that an awful waste of water anyway? It's always going to be a waste of something, until people really tackle that problem. Still, I think Japanese toilets are very interesting, as long as I don't ever have to use one.
There are even baths in Japan that you can set the exact temperature from a computer screen that you want, and the amount of water - and the computer will alert you when the settings are the way you wanted. And they had this like maybe 20 years ago (or more) already!
(Hm, I don't like how my posts sometimes change from one topic to another - like, from LASER beam in a butt into a "Japanese have some cool tech", but try to bear with it)
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