This day was already in the toilet, so let’s just go with it!
The way Zillow Toilet Day works is, I give out awards to bathrooms and/or toilets I found on Zillow, and the prize is that these people get to keep being rich and weird, which they were honestly going to do anyway.
The award for Least Privacy goes to:
This one is actually very pretty, I just would rather run to the Starbucks down the street than use this with anyone else in the room.
(And yes, we’ve all seen photos where the toilet is literally in the room. But this is the rich people version, so it’s both awkward AND fancy.)
The award for Most Options goes to:
This club has everything!
The award for Most Likely to Attract Bees goes to:
When you close the curtains, the curse is complete.
The award for Most Confounding goes to:
But the great thing is that this toilet will take you from Tokyo to Yokohama in just under an hour.
The award for Most Most goes to:
I… Like, alright, they clearly have a sense of humor and/or this is the set for a really cool OK Go video?
The award for Most Frogs goes to:
Listen, there was not even another close contender. This bathroom has twelve times more frogs than the second froggiest bathroom in the world. Just try to find a froggier bathroom. You cannot. Give up already.
The award for Most Awkwardly Symbolic goes to:
So you can feel like you’re fertilizing the flowers every single time!
The award for Porniest Bathroom goes to:
This one also gets the award for In This Lighting, You’re Never Going to Find the Contact You Dropped.
The award for Most Cursed goes to:
Love the idea of symmetrical geology! Hate that you’ll be bathing under the glare of an enraged octopus ghost.
The award for Most Bathroom-Themed goes to:
I’m not even entirely sure that’s a real toilet. It might just be part of the exhibit?
The award for Historical Abomination goes to:
We’re in ancient… Rome? Egypt? Abyssinia? Also there is literally no place to hang a towel. I’m very sad that you can’t see the toilet in this one, because I’m sure it’s spectacular.
(By the way, do you know about the time the Guggenheim trolled Trump by offering to loan him a gold toilet instead of a Picasso? Heroic.)
The award for Most Terrifying goes to:
This one is in the basement of a very expensive house. My most urgent question is not about what’s behind those doors, but why we need a spotlight on the bathtub.
I hope you have learned as much as I have today about modern American plumbing. And in all seriousness, I hope you protect your mental health today.
(And thanks to the friends and strangers who sent me a couple of these. I love that you think I’m a person you can send photos of ugly bathrooms to. You are correct.)
Thank you for your service to the nation today 🫡
Thank you for saving me from a day of oral coliform.
This was fun in its own right, and it conjured memories of that day, several decades ago, when I attended a editor's retreat at the Kohler complex in Wisconsin. In between sessions and speeches, we toured the showcase for Kohler products, where a half-dozen of us, middle-class, mid-westerners all, stood in a circle around one particular appliance, trying to understand it. It looked like a toilet but functioned more like a drinking fountain, maybe for dogs. Someone more sophisticated than us finally told us it was a bidet and explained how (though not why) it was used. The experience left me with a mental tableau of the six of us standing around the thing, scratching our heads--it was the perfect definition of what it meant to be a midwesterner in the 80s.