I don't know where I heard this bizarre expression, but I find it hilarious. Apparently, it suggests that you let pee stay in the toilet, but flush when you're done taking a dump. Why anyone would want to leave piss in the toilet, resulting in ugly toilet bowl residue eludes me, but someone was creative enough to come up with this stupid phrase, so I guess people out there are weird.

Dannye, it is possible to waste/destroy water, though not in the way you're thinking (and not in the way Greenpeace would like you to think). Tainted water is relatively-easy to reclaim, but water which has been split through electricity can only be recovered if you manage to capture the hydrogen before it escapes into deep space. So don't dump any fully-charged car batteries into the ocean, since not only would that be Bad (putting lots of fun lead and sulfuric acid in our ecosphere) but it'd dissociate a lot of water into oxygen and hydrogen.

This is also why putting a live wire with a strong AC into water results in an explosion - on one cycle, the water is heated and dissociated with one polarity, on the next the water is heated and dissociated with the other, meaning that you have, 60 times a second, very hot oxygen and hydrogen being put in the same place, where it quite happily burns, releasing all the energy which went into dissociating the water as it returns to a state of higher entropy. End result: The electricity is very efficiently converted into pure energy, and you get to find out how much energy there really is on a power line.

Sheesh. Time to give this node a sense of sanity. This saying was around a lot earlier than dannye and his anti-PC campaign would have you believe. I'm not going to split political hairs here, but I know my dad and his family used this expression back on the farm (read, before Greenpeace was ever in existance) and it was a general rule of thumb that was reserved for time when the power went out, because flushing the toilet requires what little water pressure was left in the tank. This was a time when you could go for days without power, and that water pressure was to be conserved.

The phrase 'If it's Yellow, let it Mellow' was actually adopted by California Governor/Well-known spacecase Jerry Brown in his own inimitable fashion in order to promote water conservation in the 1970s. His opponents, naturally, began to chant the complete slogan in order to express their opinion of his administration.

I have never heard this phrase in reference to water conservation. Anyone who has been to a cottage or country house in the middle of nowhere should be familiar with this concept. (Or at least if it was in the nether-regions of Canada.) The plumbing systems tend to be very exact with regard to how much the septic tank can hold. Flushing everytime one goes pee sends water down the pipes, taking valuable space in the septic tank. This rule prevents the tank from backflowing and drowning everyone in their refuse. This is not the way you want a weekend retreat to end.

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