While there is tons of anti-Bush paraphernalia out there, few things capture our disdain as well as "George W. Flush"—a design by famed urinal sculptor Clark Sorensen. Let's be honest—it would be satisfying on multiple levels. If the public urinal fails in privacy, this urinal definitely gets a prize for awkward closeness. One little spill could create a huge fight.
Clark Sorensen has created some of the most amazing and beautiful urinals you may ever see such as the Bush one seen above. These large-scale flowers and shells, deftly crafted of high fire porcelain, are arrestingly beautiful and create a whimsical marriage between beauty and functionality. The strange blend of lyric form and unmentionable men's bathroom fixture has been described as unsettling, humorous and inspired.
Each sculpture is meticulously hand built and one-of-a-kind. And while these pieces are primarily intended as works of art, they are also fully functioning vitreous porcelain fixtures that can be plumbed and used, in fact, the artist encourages it! The above picture showing a female urinal is currently doing the rounds with a note that it's a major breakthrough in female toilet technology.
The photo looks real enough, although when I showed it to several women they all said they'd never use it, which suggests it was either designed by a man, or is simply a fake. True to form, it looks more like some kind of space station, or at least what they thought space stations were going to look like in the '60s.
So it's not surprising that they didn't just stick a bunch of ordinary toilets in the back as an afterthought. After you've swilled enough champagne out of a shoe or whatever you'd order at a place like this and you need to tinkle, you travel up a winding white staircase Just in case you're worried that you've stumbled into the aliens' breeding chamber and they are about to loose their unholy spawn upon you, there is always an attendant on duty to explain that, yes, these free-standing egg-shaped pods are what you pee into.
Apparently, each pod plays eerie music and sounds when you're inside, which we guess is supposed to put you at ease. Or, alternatively, scare you more so that you do what you came to do much faster. Look, public bathrooms are horrifying. To even get to the seat, you have to wade through a lake of mystery liquid that, by the laws of logistical probability, very likely isn't water. And when you arrive, you find that the last person to use it had worse aim than a villain's henchman in a James Bond movie.
If only we had the technology to build a public bathroom that cleaned itself after the last terrible human being defiled it. Well, now we do -- a number of high-tech self-cleaning toilets have opened in New York, complete with a prestigious toilet-paper-cutting ceremony. We wish that was a joke we made there, but it really happened. And these things serve only to prove the old adage that you should be careful what you wish for. First of all, you have to pay a quarter to use them, which is an inconvenience, but understandable.
But the truly horrifying part is that you only get 15 minutes to do your business. Tough luck if you're struggling with that last burrito.
An alarm goes off when there are only three minutes left, warning you that, by God, those doors are opening whether you're done or not. If you do manage to finish, you get a generous three strips of toilet paper to clean yourself up.
After you leave, the bathroom turns into a self-cleaning robot befitting Skynet. Once the doors close, an arm comes down, cleans the toilet seat and blows it dry while high-powered jets spray seven gallons of water across the floor. The bathroom floor has both a maximum and minimum weight sensor, both so the timer doesn't start until you are inside and so the cleaning process doesn't start and scald you to death with boiling water before you exit.
There's something a little disquieting about the fact that you're only one malfunction away from scalding water in the face at any given moment. As it turns out, people still found a way to leave a mess in self-cleaning toilets, and the city finally decided to remove them when it learned that even the homeless people who went in there to smoke crack refused to use them due to how filthy they were.
This is why we can't have nice things, Seattle. For a while, the British have been trying to brainstorm ways of combating the age-old problem of bar districts -- drunk dudes shambling outside and pissing all over the damn place. The only effective solution is more toilets, but lining the streets with urinals doesn't make the city particularly attractive during the day.
The solution they've come up with? Pop-up toilets! The city of London installed "telescopic urinals" that remain invisible under the ground during the day, but slide out after the sun goes down to allow London's night life no excuse for peeing in a gutter.
Wait, London again? Do they actually intend to lead the world in the industry of bizarre toilets? There's no wash basin. If you want to scrub your hands, you'll have to toddle off to the nearby town hall, or else pick up the urinal cake and use that for soap, you monster. My bladder evacuated, I notice an embossed sign that requires me to 'adjust my dress before leaving'.
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