No kidding! Sometimes branding can go too far.
I know I’m going to regret asking but HTF does this work? Water pours out of pitchers down and my soiled bits aren’t arranged that way. Bidets work by spraying water up.
You will, indeed, regret it.
I’ve read in several places about the tradition of wiping with the hand and rinsing it with water. (Now you know why many cultures insist on shaking only with the right hand.) They insist that such cleansing is better and more thorough than western dry-paper wiping. There’s a description of a mass morning observance in The Great Railway Bazaar
It’s important to note that the shipboard trough was configured fore-and-aft. Squatting in an athwartship line of men over a stream of human waste during heavy seas is too horrible to contemplate.
That’s pretty much what I figured. I think it’s safe to say that if you just rinse your left hand rather than properly washing it your right hand will soon end up with just as much fecal bacteria on it.
This would also give one a definite preference for the hand used to scratch the nose or pick teeth. 
This is complete truth. On my first US Navy ship, Tutuila ARG-4, in September 1963they still had a trough used as a urinal with sea water in one in and out the other - it was all stainless steel, no wood, and was welded onto the bulkhead. The OLD SALTS told me of the GOOD OLE DAYS when solid waste was also disposed of in this way. This trough had a 3 - 3 1/2 inch board along the front edge only. It was a SAILOR joke for the guy on the end where the sea water came in to take a wad of toilet tissue, light it afire, and drop it in the water. You can understand the result as it pass beneath the unsuspecting, drowsy, and possibly hung-over sailors early in the morning.
Kind of hard to avoid fecal bacteria. After defecating, do you pull up your pants before you wash your hands? Fecal contamination ensues, then every time you touch your pants, you spread it.
Wow, eight years!
Not only do I not remember posting this, but two of the posters in this thread have passed on.
I think this is an example of one:
http://www.eugeneleeslover.com/US-NAVY-GUNS/TOILET-HEAD.html
I know this is an old thread (and an old post), but this doesn’t sound quite right. On every submarine that I’ve been on, the toilet flows by gravity into a holding tank (referred to as a “sanitary tank”). The sanitary tank is then either pumped out to sea, or is pressurized with high pressure air to blow it to sea. (The submarine must be at least 12 miles from shore when pumping or blowing sanitary tanks, and is usually much farther out than that.)
When a toilet is connected to a sanitary tank that is blown to sea, the toilet usually had a ball valve that was manually operated when flushing the toilet. Warning signs were hung in affected heads (i.e. restrooms) when blowing sanitary tanks. God help the sailor that opened a ball valve in a toilet when blowing sans. :smack:
I’ve never seen a toilet that was sealed with the lid, even on older subs.
zombie or no
they had to post signs.
‘This is a dressing room, not the head’.
Can’t imagine the search terms that found this. 
Remember that in the 40s and into the 50s indoor plumbing wasn’t ubiquitous.
A trough flushed by seawater would be better than an outhouse by far.
I’ll make sure I never have to go to the bathroom in Old Navy 
Yeah, my dad served on subs in the late 1960s. He took some glee in telling us kids about the pressurized toilets and the disgusting consequences of not observing proper valve protocol.
These arrangements also featured in UK shipyards. You might enjoy Billy Connolly’s description:
I was with the aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk partway when she went through a 4 year total overhaul in '87-'91. Pretty much every single compartment, tank and space was refurbished.
It’s illegal to dump waste from the pier to 6 miles out to sea. So there were 2 massive CHT (collection holding and transfer) tanks, each about the size of a one car garage that held everything until it could be pumped over the side or at the pier. 27 years after the ship was built, they were being scraped clean and repainted inside. Washed out was one thing, the guys working inside were in moon suits with remote air lines with jackhammers and chisels working on the couple of inches of built up calcium and other hardened deposits.
Just something to make you feel better about your job…
Why bother with running water? In the days of wooden ships, it was just a rickety bench right over the stern where people did “splat!” over the big blue sea. The area was appropriately called “jardines” (gardens).
Think of how it must have been in Columbus’ time. Smaller ships, tighter quarters and :eek: