Toilet paper debate resolved

Since yesterday's foul mood did not lift after my having committed two assaults and shoplifted a 50 lb sack of ice-melt from Home Depot, I decided to fill my mind with something important to displace the gloom. While hanging a vintage toidey-paper holder to provide a little more elbow-room in my nano-bathroom, my supreme apperceptive capabilities resolved the eternal toilet paper debate in an empirical way that avoids value judgments and satisfies the requirements of practical logic. The answer, of course, is that it depends on the holder.

Figure 1 illustrates a holder dating back to the dawn of scrolled toilet paper as we know it today. This type of device was a wooden cylinder held by a simple wire bail, which was attached to the wall (outdoor or indoor) with some sort of cleat or clamp. As Figure 1 shows, the overhand hanging method is most appropriate for one of these old-timey fixtures; the underhand method would leave the end sheet of the paper in a position to adhere to the wall via static cling (or indelicate residues), slightly complicating the task at hand for the user.

Figure 2, by contrast, shows a typical modern recessed fixture, which seems to be purpose-designed for the underhand hanging method; this design provides a "grasping margin" between wall and paper, owing to the paper's pseudo-cantilevering effect as it emerges from the recess and falls under the unconstrained influence of gravity. Using the overhand method with this type of modern fixture creates, psychologically, a more aggressive incursion into the bathroom's living space because the paper creates a sort of inverse knee-wall or short partition that gives the illusion of reducing potty elbow-room.

And that, as legendary WGN morning man Wally Phillips used to say, is why we call this "The Learning Place."