Years ago, days after I wrote about the amazing (and disgusting) foot-pedal-powered toilet seat lifter, a curious reader stopped me on Church Street and said, "That might have been the most revolting product I've ever read about in a newspaper. Where can I buy one?"

When I described my foibles finding the septic tank in my back yard, a neighbor commiserated with me, "The world is full of you-know-what. You wouldn't think it would be so hard to find?"

And a few months ago when I penned a column about how the ancient Mesopotamians probably did not make their bricks out of dog poop, though my daughter might have, a schoolteacher said, "You would do very well with my first-graders. You really understand potty humor."

Well, I am about to try to elevate my game a bit, and move from the toilet to the sink. Actually, I am moving beyond the sink. I am stretching all the way to the electric hand dryer.

I have a new favorite toy in the public restroom. Wait, that sounds creepy even by my admittedly very low standards.

Let me try that again: I have a new favorite (ITAL)product(END ITAL) in the public restroom: It's the Xlerator Hand Dryer. The moniker alone should guarantee the device admission into the Toilet World Name Hall of Fame.

The Xlerator is an electric hand dryer so powerful that if you unhooked the unit from the wall, the air stream would send the machine into orbit. I am exaggerating, but not by as much as you think. We're talking a motor that is jet engine powerful. It is actually capable of drying your hands after you wash them, which sounds like a pretty basic product attribute in the electric hand dryer category, but we all know that most hand dryers work about as well as submerging your fingers in Lake Champlain.

When the restroom lacks a paper towel dispenser, most of the time I end up drying my hands on toilet paper, my socks, or -- if I am in a shopping mall -- paper napkins I purloin from the nearby food court. If you are half as germophobic as I am, each of these options rings serious alarms on the Personal Disgust-O-Meter.

Best of all, you don't have to touch the Xlerator. Frankly, if I can get in and out of a public bathroom without touching anything other than soap and water, I am one very happy camper. In my humble opinion, the Xlerator is therefore a breakthrough product.

Bill Gagnon, the marketing manager at Excel Dryer Inc., manufacturer of the Xlerator, remembers when the company was testing the device in focus groups. "People would try it, and you could see the pure shock on their faces at the force of the dryer. They'd jump back and use expletives -- but in a good way," Gagnon recalls.

The Xlerator boasts a redesigned 20,000 RPM vacuum motor. I don't know a whole lot (well, anything) about vacuums and RPMs, but 20,000 sounds to me like a mighty big number: I'd wager any vacuum with a motor that powerful is capable of vacuuming up small children. The dryer is, in fact, used at bathrooms in Disney World, and while the Magic Kingdom has no plans to use the Xlerator to send a princess into orbit anytime soon, Gagnon says kids love it.

And why not? It dries hands completely -- and completely is the key word -- in 10 to 15 seconds. Most electric hand dryers work on the geologic clock.

It is also more energy-efficient than its competitors and paper towels. It's a lean, green hand-drying machine.

And, of course, there is that name: A name worthy of a comic book champion or a science fiction superhero, a character played someday in a film by Angelina Jolie or George Clooney or -- one always can dream -- William Shatner. After all, this a dryer that really does go where no dryer has gone before.

(This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on June 4, 2006.)

Recently, after reading (and then, I have to assume, burning) one of my books, a female reader wrote to tell me that I was an insensitive and politically unenlightened man. She then hinted that she might have to tattle on me by (this is absolutely true) sharing the offending book with Oprah Winfrey.

Well, this reader might be right about me. I might have the sensitivity of a sock puppet. But my male friends? They are responsive, evolved, politically enlightened ...

... crybabies.

OK, they're not crybabies. But they are all, shall we say, in touch with their inner tear ducts. At least when it comes to their children.

Today is Father's Day, and so I asked some of my friends who are fathers to share with me a moment when they realized they were dads. And almost all of them responded with a story that ended with them crying. Sobbing. Bawling. This was true even of the lawyers!

To wit, Jeff Kilgore is an attorney in Waterbury. The moment for him occurred 20 years ago this July, at the hospital after his wife had given birth to their daughter, Alex. The nurse handed him the swaddled little bundle that was his newborn daughter and the tears just started to stream down his face.

Then there was Dana Yeaton, a playwright in Middlebury. About a month before his son, James, was born 24 years ago, he was ripping a sheet of plywood in two. Abruptly his back muscles started to spasm, and he ended up on the concrete floor, unable to move. A few days later he went to get a massage, and when the therapist touched his feet, he burst into tears.

"Hmmm," the therapist asked, "Anything going on these days -- you know, emotionally?"

"Turns out," Yeaton recalls, "I was feeling a little pressure. It was no longer OK to mess up. It was time to be a grown-up." Happily, he has since outgrown that quaint notion, and by his own admission has been messing up consistently ever since.

But there were those tears. And the same was true for Patrick Clow, a technical support manager for an electronics firm when he isn't helping to raise his almost 2-year-old son, Elliott. Elliott went to day care for the first time two months after he was born, and Clow was responsible for bringing the boy there. Only problem? Clow couldn't bring himself to leave.

"I said to the caregiver, 'I'll just sit out here for a minute, in case he cries,'" he recalls. And the baby did cry. A little. "But even when he was perfectly calm," Clow says, "I was still there. I'd stand up and walk toward the door, but a haze obscured my vision and I couldn't actually see the door anymore. This went on for about an hour. When I finally got enough courage to leave, I sat in my car and bawled for 15 minutes."

I don't think my own daughter has ever seen me cry because (don't forget) I'm an insensitive mop wringer of a dad. Once my daughter saw me get a little teary during a poignant father-daughter moment in "To Kill a Mockingbird," and she was extremely weirded out by the very idea that I might have tear ducts.

But Clow, Yeaton and Kilgore were on to something. Clow referred to "the strength of the umbilical connection" that first time he dropped Elliott off at day care. I still recall vividly the relief I felt the first time I picked my daughter up at day care and saw she was fine. I remember the pride I experienced when I watched her reassure her sobbing mother she would be OK as she climbed onto the school bus for the first day of kindergarten. And I know well the wistfulness I felt as I watched her say good-bye to her elementary school teachers just about a year ago now.

Therapist and writer Thomas Moore once wrote that bringing "new life into existence" might be as close as we come to divinity in this world. I think he's right. But I also believe that one of the great joys of fatherhood is the chance it gives a man to be mortal.

Happy Father's Day.

((This column originally appeared in the Burlington Free Press on June 18, 2006.)