Turkish dude buys a public toilet for his daughter

A Turkish businessman splashed out a staggering £90,000 on a Liverpool loo.
Retired construction company director Ilhami Yumak bought the rundown Toxteth toilet block as a present for his daughter.

Liverpool public toilet sale

Fancy pay toilet uses 14 gallons of water per use

Some City Room readers were understandably perplexed by the 14 gallons of water consumed by each use of the spiffy new pay toilet at Madison Square Park. So we will break it down for you, according to what Cemusa, the Spanish advertising conglomerate that runs the toilets, told us:
Toilet flush: 1.29 gallons
Basin auto-cleaning: 1.2 gallons
Toilet auto-cleaning: 3.85 gallons
Floor auto-cleaning 7.71 gallons
The total (not including any hand-washing) is 14 gallons, give or take.


A Toilet That Uses 14 Gallons? ‘Oh Gosh!’

Pee Forest

Seattle artist Steven Miller has created an accordion-fold pull-out book of sepia-toned photographs that tells the timeless story of two handsome furry bearded men that happen upon each other in the woods and pee all over each other.

This particular piece is an edition of 10 sold in an incredible art machine called EARL 3.0. This robotic art dealer, probably a candy machine in another life and reminiscent of the beloved Artomat, offers one-of-kind or limited editions of artists work, with prices from a few dollars and up.





















You can find EARL 3.0 at the The Hideout Lounge, located at 1005 Boren Ave in Seattle, open regular bar hours (and irregular ones too.) Nice bathrooms, clean, one for each sex. Hideout owner Greg Lundgren tells us that Earl 3.0 is Indian. He is state of the art vending equipment, with a laser and everything. He comes straight out of the factory, so has no previous experience dealing art, but has been a fast learner. He is showcasing some of the coolest, most affordable contemporary art in Seattle, and I'm sure given a year or two, robots will be dealing all of the art around town. Kind of like gas stations and cash machines.

Where Lou Reed Peed: Remembering the CBGB Toilet

At the end of this Time's feature on the "punk house" — those big, cavernous sticker-encrusted warehouses, in which punks from Brooklyn to Nebraska hold shows and bake and digest soy casseroles — is a small but touching paean to an underappreciated facet of now-defunct club CBGB: The toilet. "The be-stickered, be-fliered and graffiti-emblazoned black hole" was a modern icon, the Times says, and none other than Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore agreed. “That’s the one thing that sears itself into your memory,” he told the paper. “It’s that toilet.” Shudder. Something tells us the contractors working on the John Varvatos store would agree.

The Urinal Cake Candle

Bring the industrial chemical freshness of a public restroom right to your home.

We're often asked if THE URINAL CAKE CANDLE smells like pee. It doesn't. It's a cinnamony floral smell that's modeled after a urinal cake our founder once relieved himself on at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas. This candle covers both number 1 and number 2 odors and has become a regular contributor in the HOTWICKS world headquarters bathroom. This is the perfect gift for anyone that likes tacos, asparagus, and really hot chicken wings.

Like all of our scents, THE URINAL CAKE CANDLE is hand made in the USA (take that China!) and comes in a cool 8 oz tin that's guaranteed to spark up a conversation.

via Grow-a-Brain

Hotwicks

Urinal game banned in Belgium

This past summer, a line of urinal-based games began cropping up in Europe, where you were required to pee on a sensor to guide a car on a screen in front of you. If you did badly, a warning popped up asking you not to drive home that night. Well, bad news if you were hoping to be the next champion of the urination-powered video games circuit in Belgium. Police there just banned the urinal games in the GamePower Expo in Gent, citing them as indecent. So, you heard it here first, peeing in a bathroom is illegal in Belgium. The street corner though? Perfectly fine.

Woman sues Kmart for collecting tax on toilet paper

MONROEVILLE, Pa. — A western Pennsylvania woman won $100 plus court costs after she sued Kmart for twice collecting sales tax on a nontaxable necessity: toilet paper.

Mary Bach, of Murrysville, said Kmart offered to settle the case out of court before a Thursday hearing at which a Monroeville district judge sided with her. But the settlement required her to sign a confidentiality agreement, which would have defeated the purpose of her suit, Bach said.

"I want consumers as they shop during the important holiday to be aware of what is and what isn't taxable," Bach said after the verdict. "I would lose my ability to spread that message if I were gagged."

Bach sued in October after a Kmart store in Monroeville twice collected a 7 percent tax when she bought a 12-roll package of toilet paper for $3.99.

Using text messages to find nearest toilet in London

LONDON: A new service promises Londoners they'll never have to spend much time looking for the loo.

Westminster City Council, which covers London's bustling Oxford Street, the West End, and the Houses of Parliament, on Thursday launched "SatLav" — a toilet-finding service for mobile phone users.

Harried theatergoers, distressed shoppers and hard-pressed bar patrons in London's West End can now text the word "toilet" — and receive a text back giving the address of the nearest public facility.

The system, which covers 40 public toilets, triangulates a user's position by measuring the strength of the phone signal. The texts cost 25 pence (US$0.52, €0.35), while most of Westminster's toilets are free.


Texting your way to a toilet in London

Urinal stencils from Italy

Toilet restaurant in Taipei

This Taipei restaurant might consider it a compliment to be called an outhouse as the Modern Toilet diner is one of chain of themed eateries appealing to largely young clientele with a toilet humor.

All 100 seats in the crowded diner are made from toilet bowls, not chairs. Sink faucets and gender-coded “WC” signs appear throughout the three-storey facility, one of 12 in an island-wide chain of eateries with a toilet theme.

Toilet-themed restaurant on Unusual Life.