Saturday, January 20, 2007

Water Signs


I am a Pisces, a fish, I suppose I see myself fit to give my opinion on the latest involving my surrounding element: Water!
Apparently there has been some controversy surrounding this liquid our bodies are partly composed of. (In men about 72% of the body mass is water. This value is about 68% in women due to a higher proportion of body fat. This is the total body water.) First, there was the radio contest held in California proving deadly as a contestant ingested too much water to win some video game console.
"Jennifer Strange, 28, died last Friday after taking part in a competition to win a Nintendo Wii console on Sacramento's KDND-FM.
In the contest, "Hold your wee for a Wii", about 18 contestants tried to drink as much water as they could without going to the toilet.
After several hours, Strange finished second in the contest, winning tickets to a Justin Timberlake concert. But by then she was already feeling ill from the effects of drinking too much water. Her stomach had swollen and she was complaining of headaches."
I am sure I don't have to go into detail about this. Its just plain sad and irresponsible of the radio station to not have demanded paramedics be on the scene just in case something were to happen.
The next round of water bashing is the result of hotels and sassy restaurants always asking if you want "bottled water, still or sparkling, or JUST TAP water?" to accompany your meal. I must admit that I sometimes feel awkward saying that I want tap water. They make you feel like this should be some special occasion and that the water should be special too. Hotels like the Ritz in New York are top notch on service but also on the scale of ridiculousness:
"In New York the Ritz-Carlton Hotel recently appointed a water sommelier to advise customers on which types of water would go best with which foods. "It's been extremely well received," says Filip Wretman, who usually stocks three sparkling and three still waters but can obtain as many as 80 with 48 hours' notice. "People are interested in the taste but also the history: our Fiji water is so pure because it fell as rain 450 years ago, before the industrial revolution."
Uh huh, that is what all of us wanted out of our dining experience, the history of the water we are drinking.
On TreeHugger I found this piece by Times of London food commentator Giles Coren: "Mineral water is a preposterous vanity. It is flown and shipped around the world, from France and Norway at best, from Japan and Fiji at worst. It is bottled in glass that is mostly thrown away and is stupidly heavy to freight, or in plastic which never, ever, decomposes and just goes to landfill or ends up in one of the “plastic patches” the size of Texas currently gyring in our oceans.
Food snobs and restaurant critics make a big song and dance about mineral waters they like and don’t like. New York’s Ritz-Carlton even caters to the whim of abstemious punters with a dedicated water list and sommelier.
The vanity of it! While half the world dies of thirst or puts up with water you wouldn’t piss in, or already have, we have invested years and years, and vast amounts of money, into an ingenious system which cleanses water of all the nasties that most other humans and animals have always had to put up with, and delivers it, dirt-cheap, to our homes and workplaces in pipes, which we can access at a tap.
And yet last year we bought three billion litres of bottled water. 3,000,000,000 litres! I have no idea how much that is. But it seems a lot. Especially when we were fooled into buying it because of labels that said “pure as an alpine stream”, “bottled at the foot of a Mexican volcano” or “cleansed for three million years beneath a Siberian glacier”. What morons we are."
Way to stand up for the drowning of our perspective on a basic necessity of life.
Let us start a new trend. Turning down the bottled stuff and demanding the tap water is environmentally sound. (Unless you are traveling to a location with fecal flavored water) Feel good when you leave the restaurant for choosing the clearly wiser option. TAP ain't CRAP!

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