Category — Cool Bathrooms and Technology

Shaanxi Normal University has installed 6 female urinals for its students to use in an effort to conserve water.

Unfortunately, students are not big fans of the urinals, which require a disposable paper funnel to aid in the aiming process. Who would have imagined that awkwardly peeing into a disposable paper funnel wouldn’t be fun?

Read at Shangaiist (via Fark)

The bad news is that Kenny Lao, founder of Rickshaw Dumplings, doesn’t exactly have a luxurious bathroom.

The good news is that it’s about to get a whole lot better. Dubbed New York City’s Worst Bathroom (surely there are much, much worse?), Kenny’s facilities are now the subject of an Architizer design challenge.

Up to the challenge? Winners get a $5,000 design fee and the joy of seeing their design come to life.

via BoingBoing

Each year, Charmin sponsors a free public bathroom for New York City holidaygoers (previously). This year’s bathrooms at 142 West 42nd St feature a national theme, representing different iconic US locations (good luck figuring out what those locations are!).

But the big story this year and the big coup for Charmin is the grand opening was presided over by none other than Kim Kardashian, who may just be the most beautiful woman to ever preside over a bathroom grand opening. Sorry Kim, but that was totally meant to be a compliment!

Check out more pics of Kim and some fuzzy bears at The Superficial

Also look for Charmin to crown a King and Queen for the last few days of the year to welcome and/or creep out visitors to these bathrooms. More on that as it develops…

If you’ve ever sorted your recyclables, you know just how much fun that can be. A German restaurant decided to take that fun into the bathroom with urinals designated for use based on consumption of different kinds of alcohol!

Beer • Wine • Non-Alcoholic • Other

🙂

No clue on what to do if you’ve been drinking beer and wine…

via BoingBoing, Flickr

Mrs. ICBE and I went out for lunch to En Fuego in Del Mar recently. As is my custom, before eating I went to the bathroom. One there, I was presented with the following sight:

Did my eyes deceive me, or was this indeed a dual-flush toilet in the flesh? (I’ve only seen one once before) Well the next thing my eyes saw was this:

Curiously, I held down the right button and the toilet did indeed flush. Next, I held down the left button.

Nothing.

Apparently En Fuego managed to get their holds on a dual-flush toilet, but didn’t bother connecting the second button. Newsflash, dual-button is not the same thing as dual-flush!

On a side note, they also had a window in the bathroom opening into the restaurant! You could only see it from the sink, but still – creepy!

As a man, a middle-of-the-night-in-the-dark pee session usually means one of three things:

1. You pee sitting down
2. You turn a light on and blind yourself for a minute or two first
3. You pee all over the seat and floor

While I simply opt for #1 (no pun intended) as a simple and effective solution, not everyone may be as comfortable peeing from a seated position. Enter the Jonny Glow, stickers designed to glow in the dark all night long and illuminate the toilet enough so that a man no longer has any excuse for missing.

Jonny Glow promises to be inconspicuous during the day and glow all night long. And if it ever stops glowing they promise to replace it – free! For only $12.95, it sounds almost too good to be true. I’ve never seen anything glow for more than a couple hours after the lights went out, but I’d love to be proven wrong!

via mhh5th and Jalopnik

If you hadn’t heard, Chelsea Clinton is getting married. As the daughter of an ex President, she does things a little fancier than most of us, including renting some of the swankiest portable toilets around for her wedding. TMZ puts the total toilet rental cost at about $15,000 – ouch!

Now I’ve been in some nice portable toilets before, but I have a feeling they won’t be anything like the ones Chelsea’s guests will be enjoying.

Wells Cargo Platinum Edition

If postings have been a little sparse lately, it’s because we here at the ICBE have been spending part of our summer scouring the globe for noteworthy bathrooms. One such chance encounter occurred recently in the lovely city of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. In the hunt for a place for toddlers to play that wasn’t insanely busy and overcrowded (ie not the beach), we happened upon Chaldecott Park.

It was a lovely park with a lovely playground and a lovely sprayground and some positively not-at-all-lovely bathrooms. Aside from the fantastic stench, I was greeted with the following sight upon entering:

That’s right, in the year 2010 Chaldecott Park still features a bonafide trough urinal. Not only that, but the single toilet featured some rather curious signage:

DO NOT STAND ON TOILET – Thanks

As you may have expected I absolutely did not relieve myself in the trough, instead opting for the toilet pictured above. You will also be pleased to know that at no time was I even tempted to stand on the toilet, though evidently that’s a bit of a problem with the locals.

I have a confession – I don’t mind auto-dispensing soap dispensers, and I can live with auto-flush urinals. But we’ve said it before:

Auto-Flush Toilets are the Devil

Still not convinced? Check out this sign spotted in the wild by ICBE aficionado SM:

IF TOILET DOES NOT FLUSH AUTOMATICALLY,
PLEASE PRESS THE BLACK BUTTON
THANK YOU

Here’s what SM had to say:

Just let me flush it on my own in the first place, and we won’t have this issue. I can also pump my own soap.

Sing it sister!

I recently had the pleasure of going aboard the USS Midway (Wikipedia), an aircraft carrier currently serving as a museum ship in San Diego. Aside from being a generally super-cool museum, the Midway contains something that you will not be surprised was of interest to me: bathrooms.

I managed to capture this picture of what I believe to be the bathroom for some junior officers – please don’t mind the “artistic” angle, I had to reach over and around a sheet of plexiglass to make the shot. Overall, some fairly nice facilities for a boat not designed with luxury in mind.

Fantastic ICBE reader Andy went one step further, procuring two shots of the bathroom in the Midway’s brig.

Click for larger

Click for larger

While I certainly expected a step down in the accommodations, I didn’t expect you’d have to actually stand in the toilet to use the sink. Ouch!