Silicon Valley has reinvented the pay toilet. But this time, you have to use an app to get in, yielding metadata (foeterdata?) to the powers that be. Yield the who, what, when and where of your bowel movements with Good2Go, the shittiest valley startup yet. Their turd-key solution is free now, but you'll have to spend a penny later.
As photographed above by Christopher Kennedy (website), a developer from San Francisco: "Welcome to app hell. You need an app or a printed QR code to use the bathroom here. The app is “free for a limited time” so after that, I imagine they plan to disrupt pay toilets. Silicon Valley is a parody unto itself. You cannot democratize access to utilities by making a gated community of smartphone and subscriber users."
Find and securely access modern restrooms – all through your smartphone ...
Q: Do I have to pay for Good2Go if I’ve made a purchase at the café?
A: No. Café patrons can ask the barista for a QR code or download the app for free.
Q: How much does it cost to use the app?
A: All subscriptions to Good2Go are free for a limited time!
Q: Is Good2Go only available in San Francisco?
A: San Francisco is now live and we will be launching in other major cities soon. Want Good2Go in your city?
The only civilized thing to do, if you encounter one of these, is to play Louis Armstrong's We Have All The Time In The World at maximum volume while taking a dump on the floor in front of it. Read the rest
In Alor Setar, Malaysia, married couple Zul Hanif Anip, 25, and his wife Puteri shot this video of a strange slithering creature emerging from their toilet. Anip insists that it didn't look anything like any snake he'd ever seen. He claims they captured the creature and release it into the river.
"I think the creature grew up inside the pipe works connected to the toilet hole, because I have checked and there is no entry point for it to have got inside," Anip said. "He was about two meters [6.5 feet] long with a very fat, thick body. I'm not sure if it was a snake or a kind of tidal creature or from the swamp.
"Its head was very small and it had a short tail, which did not look like a snake."
(UPI)
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Mike Greene of Lattimore, North Carolina is a good neighbor. When the 88-year-old man down the street called Mike to help get a snake out of his toilet, he was happy to help. After all, he'd had plenty of practice.
"When I arrived, only the tail of the snake was visible, so I had to reach in and pull the snake out of the toilet," Greene says. "It was a very long black rat snake, about 6-feet-long. This was the sixth snake that I have removed from the same toilet in the past four years."
(WCNC)
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r/TFABAARBI, as in That's Fucking Awesome But Also A Really Bad Idea, is my new favorite subreddit, featuring all sorts of cool things that are, nonetheless, serious mistakes. I have selected a few here for your context-free enjoyment.
Last, but not least, quicksand fun!
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Sadly, it's already sold out, but Trump tweets toilet paper is perhaps the gift of 2017. While you're waiting for stock to replenish, you can instead wipe your arse on his face. Read the rest
Bidets have never caught on in the United States, perceived as a fixture meant for posh hotels an prissy home bathrooms. Of course they're quite the norm in Europe, Japan, and other regions. But not only are bidets more sanitary than toilet paper, they're actually much more eco-conscious. From Scientific American:
Justin Thomas, editor of the website metaefficient.com, considers bidets to be “a key green technology” because they eliminate the use of toilet paper. According to his analysis, Americans use 36.5 billion rolls of toilet paper every year, representing the pulping of some 15 million trees. Says Thomas: “This also involves 473,587,500,000 gallons of water to produce the paper and 253,000 tons of chlorine for bleaching.” He adds that manufacturing requires about 17.3 terawatts of electricity annually and that significant amounts of energy and materials are used in packaging and in transportation to retail outlets.
To those who say that bidets waste water, advocates counter that the amount is trivial compared to how much water we use to produce toilet paper in the first place.
This non-electric Greenco Bidet is $25 on Amazon and has many adoring fans. Read the rest
Japan's leading bidet toilet manufacturers (including Toto, Panasonic, and Toshiba) have come together through their industry association, the Japan Sanitary Equipment Industry Association, to agree upon a common set of UI conventions for the meanings of the icons on the buttons on the bidets' control panels, thus ending an era in which you might think you were getting "wash and dry" but actually ended up with "layer-cut and dye-job." Read the rest
San Antonio, Texas has what is probably the world's largest collection of toilet seat art under one roof: Barney Smith’s Toilet Seat Art Museum. Take a couple of minutes to enjoy Wes Plate's profile of a charming old guy's lifelong hobby. Read the rest
People need toilets, or the poop starts piling up, so video games that are supposed to simulate human environments need toilets to attain willing suspension of disbelief. Read the rest
NASA issued a public $30,000 bounty "for fecal, urine, and menstrual management systems to be used in the crew’s launch and entry suits over a continuous duration of up to 144 hours." From the competition brief:
Current space suits are worn for launch and entry activities and in-space activities to protect the crew from any unforeseen circumstances that the space environment can cause. A crew member could find themselves in this suit for up to 10 hours at a time nominally for launch or landing, or up to 6 days if something catastrophic happens while in space.
The old standby solution consisted of diapers, in case astronauts needed to relieve themselves. However, the diaper is only a very temporary solution, and doesn’t provide a healthy/protective option longer than one day.
What's needed is a system inside a space suit that collects human waste for up to 144 hours and routes it away from the body, without the use of hands. The system has to operate in the conditions of space - where solids, fluids, and gases float around in microgravity (what most of us think of as "zero gravity") and don't necessarily mix or act the way they would on earth. This system will help keep astronauts alive and healthy over 6 days, or 144 hrs.
Space Poop Challenge (HeroX) Read the rest
If you have ever swallowed 20 golf balls, a pound of orange peels, or a pound and a half of chicken nuggets, then worried your habits might overwhelm your toilet, you might need this workhorse. Read the rest
Now you too can spend a penny in a priceless pissoir: New York's Guggenheim Museum is inviting visitors to take a slash in a gold toilet created by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. Read the rest
Upcycler extraordinaire Rodney Allen Trice turned salvage toilet bowls into designer lighting! From Refitting the Planet:
To contribute my ideas and vision and energies in the arena of creative repurposing or applied deconstruction was an honor.
here are some off the initial sketches and the build of THE TOILET CHANDELIER. My latest, largest and first piece built in my studios new home base of PITTSBURGH, yinz!!!
Very Exciting! Now I am making tweaks and changes to this design. There are still things to work out as it was a race to complete it at this event on Saturday, but the piece will be on permanent display at Construction Junction forevermore once completed! WOO HOO!!
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The small town of Minturn, Colorado won the 2015 America's Best Bathroom Contest put on by Cintas, a company that handles restroom cleaning and supplies among other things. Minter's Town Planning Director Janet Hawkinson was involved in the design of the restrooms, inspired by the entrances to gold and silver mines. From the Denver Post:
The two restrooms, one for men and one for women, sit a few feet apart and feature fabricated wood pieces — 320 different pieces total — on the sides where they face each other to mimic an adit, or an entrance to a mine in honor of Minturn's rich mining history. Inside the bathrooms, walls are painted turquoise and copper and feature steel butterflies on the ceiling. Conception, design and construction were all done locally.
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Rats can tread water for up to three days, and hold their breath under water for three minutes. Read the rest
Christian Lusardi, 43, of Fayetteville, North Carolina was pleased to win $6,814 in an Atlantic City poker tournament. But he was sad when his attempt to get rid of $3.6 million of counterfeit casino chips he'd used in the tournament was unsuccessful. Mr. Lusardi pleaded guilty to trademark counterfeiting and criminal mischief and will spend five years in prison. According to Carbon Poker, Lusardi is "already in prison for 5 years right now stemming from a bootleg DVD case where he made over $1 million."
Yahoo News:
Authorities said Lusardi, after suspecting the fake chips had been noticed, flushed them down the toilet in his room at Harrah's Resort Atlantic City, where he had been staying. But the chips clogged the pipes, and guests on the floor below complained that water was dripping into their rooms.
Mr. Lusardi was also ordered to pay the Borgata hotel $463,540 for having to cancel the rest of the tournament and Harrah's Casino Hotel $9,455 for clogging the plumbing. Read the rest
For $25/month, you can soon have access to a network of guaranteed clean bathrooms in New York City through a new app called Looie. The service launches in July with seven bathrooms at cafes and restaurants in TriBeCa. Read the rest
