Friday Flush - 1 June 2012

Welcome back to the boglogger's Friday Flush! Catch up on the web's premier round up of global loo news!

To Pee or Not to Pee

First up, a debate in the UK about whether or not it is acceptable to urinate in public. You can read the full article here, but for me the real winner is in the comments.

There should be a national database of people who feel it is acceptable to urinate in public. They should then be banned from all public swimming pools.
~ mastutio

My favourite is from nblake42, who offers this very British tale:

One afternoon last year I walked up the road to my house to discover a man urinating on my driveway. Like a good, responsible, British citizen, I pretended it wasn't my house and walked on past.

There'll be no surprises that my personal view is quite liberal. If there aren't any facilities around (as there increasingly aren't) then you need to go no matter what the surroundings, or risk causing yourself an injury.

Quick off the mark

Which describes the feat, not my delayed reporting of it.

Earlier this month, Jolene Van Vugt motorised into the record books by beating the land speed record for a motorised toilet. I could elaborate on this story, but I think it really tells itself.

Prosaic advice from Toilet Man

Jack Sim, founder of the World Toilet Organisation, gives great advice to Israeli students about entrepreneurship.

If you can use other people’s money, other people’s power, other people’s distribution, other people’s media, and other people’s influence and connections, and you align them towards a common mission, then each of them will join the party willingly.

As Sim says, he couldn't have run anything as fringe as the World Toilet Summit if governments and media weren't very willing participants.

Need to take the world's largest dump?

Maybe you need the world's largest toilet. Designer Sou Fujimoto has created a toilet like no other in Ichihara City, Japan - a single cubicle encased in glass surrounded by 200 square metres of garden.

I think the concept is great and the execution is breathtaking. At the moment, without the landscaping, it looks remarkably like a cemetery, and I wonder if this is on purpose? When the landscaping is finalised I think it'll be a really beautiful statement. About what? About how the mundane, the everyday, the routine, the necessary can still be beautiful.