"Winners at the April tasting... included melt​ed snow that had been filtered through Peruvian volcanic rock, and deep-sea water that had been pumped up 80 miles off the coast of South Korea."

"There was water gathered from nets hung in a misty Tasmanian pine forest, and a Texas brand laced with lithium called Crazy Water.... Hotels are adding precisely designed water bars. Home wine cellars have become water cellars, where children are encouraged to select bottles with their parents. Water sommelier programs continue to grow. And of course, water influencers gather more and more followers...."

From "You’ve Heard of Fine Wine. Now Meet Fine Water. Bottled waters from small, pristine sources are attracting a lot of buzz, with tastings, sommeliers and even water cellars" (NYT).

It sounds like comedy, but it's really happening. As for that water pumped up from the "deep sea," it sounds salty, and it had me wondering if it's possible for unsalty water to somehow exist below the salt water. The NYT article doesn't impinge on the fantasy of the specialness of the water, but I believe these waters are processed, are they not? That deep-sea water must be desalinated and then a chosen mix of minerals is added, right? And "water gathered from nets"? Does that sound ethereal to you... or unclean? Why not water gathered from towels hung in a steamy bathroom?

"Having spent two years in a mild hysteria over tap water, I no longer have my old, unthinking faith in it. Sometimes I miss that naïveté."

"But in its place, I have something better. The whole ordeal encouraged me to ask questions and engage others in dialogue instead of trafficking in superstition — to make up my own mind. Instead of simply relying on the warnings of others, I did my own research, learning that tap water is subject to more regulation than bottled water; the most recent survey of L.A. tap water showed it to be compliant with the Environmental Protection Agency’s measures.... Drinking tap water feels to me like a kind of civic duty too, because it means consuming the public resource that an ostensibly well-intentioned government system — and not a for-profit bottled-water company’s marketing firm — has worked hard to offer its citizens....."

Writes A. Cerisse Cohen, in "The Unparalleled Daily Miracle of Tap Water/Paying closer attention to what was coming out of my faucet changed the way I see the world" (NYT).

I drink tap water, and I always have. 

"Then one day, damp and desperate, I furiously unscrewed the showerhead, found a sharp object and extracted the flow-choking gasket-and-screen device."

"I swear I wouldn’t have done it if I lived in the parched Southwest, but an invigorating blast from the Catskill/Delaware watersheds was irresistible. Little did I know then that I was speaking truth to shower. Meanwhile, nobody is throttling the cataracts of water needed to cool servers at the gargantuan data centers firing up our artificial intelligence future. In 2023, according to the Financial Times, data centers in Northern Virginia alone used nearly 2 billion gallons of water. University of California at Riverside researchers estimate that, in 2027, thirsty AI will slurp up between 1.1 trillion and 1.7 trillion gallons of water globally. Don’t blame China’s DeepSeek; its energy demands are much lower than competitors,’ and it uses no water at all to answer questions about Tiananmen Square, the Uyghurs or a democratic Taiwan."

From "Your showerhead is lying to you/Higher pressure is a blessing in more ways than one" (WaPo)(free-flowing-access link, so you can finally rinse that metaphorical shampoo out of your lusterless headhair).

Why was the author "speaking truth to shower"? Because studies show that people use less water when they're not struggling with low water pressure.

And here, listen to Trump talk about his "beautiful luxuriant hair" in "this crazy shower" that just goes "drip, drip."

Me, I take a bath. It takes me 15 minutes to fill the bathtub. I doubt I'd ever take anything close to a 15-minute shower. 

"The United States Military just entered the Great State of California and, under Emergency Powers, TURNED ON THE WATER flowing abundantly from the Pacific Northwest, and beyond."

"The days of putting a Fake Environmental argument, over the PEOPLE, are OVER. Enjoy the water, California!!!"

Writes Trump, at Truth Social.

"A large reservoir in Pacific Palisades that is part of the Los Angeles water supply system was out of commission when a ferocious wildfire destroyed thousands of homes and other structures nearby..."

"... the Los Angeles Times found," in "State to probe why Pacific Palisades reservoir was offline, empty when firestorm exploded" (L.A. Times).

Officials said that the Santa Ynez Reservoir had been closed since about February for repairs to its cover, leaving a 117-million-gallon water storage complex empty in the heart of the Palisades for nearly a year. The revelation comes amid growing questions about why firefighters ran out of water while battling the blaze, which ignited Tuesday during catastrophically high winds.... 

"You know in Los Angeles, you can't get proper amounts of water... In order to protect a tiny little fish, the water up north gets routed into the Pacific Ocean."

"Donald Trump was mocked for sounding the alarm on the California water/fire crisis during his interview with Joe Rogan. Turns out, he was right. Trump spent nearly 7 minutes ranting about the issue, blasting Newsom for doing nothing to fix the problem."

Tweets Collin Rugg.

An excerpt from Trump's rant about the water: "Millions and millions of gallons of water gets poured [into the Pacific].... I got it all done. Nobody could believe it. It was all done. I said, I got it. You got so much water. All you have to do is sign, and [Newsom] didn't wanna sign.... Every time I go to California, I say you have so much water. They don't know it... I'm telling you, people living in Beverly Hills, they turn off the water...."

Donald Trump was mocked for sounding the alarm on the California water/fire crisis during his interview with Joe Rogan.

Turns out, he was right.

Trump spent nearly 7 minutes ranting about the issue, blasting Newsom for doing nothing to fix the problem.

Trump specifically… pic.twitter.com/zSls82byPo

— Collin Rugg (@CollinRugg) January 8, 2025

ADDED: The Trump episode of Joe Rogan went up on October 25, 2024, and if you go here, at Podscribe, you'll be at the beginning of Trump's L.A. water rant, with both audio and transcript. I'll do my own edit of the text:

"Flannery O’Connor’s favorite meal at the Sanford House restaurant in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she lunched regularly with her mother..."

"... was fried shrimp and peppermint chiffon pie.... Every morning started with Catholic Mass followed by cornflakes and a thermos of coffee in her spinster bedroom while she wrote for three hours. The writing time, she said, was her 'filet mignon.'... [O'Connor's biographer] told me that 'you wouldn’t want to eat what O’Connor ate' and described the cuisine she ate at home with her mother as a 'curdled, dry, dyspeptic kind of fare.' At home, O’Connor and her mother rarely had their meals in the dining room. Left to her own devices, O’Connor might eat a tin of sardines for lunch. Once, during the brief time in which O’Connor lived alone in New York City, she served her friend Lyman Fulton nothing but 'goat’s milk cheese and faucet water'—which later became a running joke between them.... [T]he restaurant’s recipe for the peppermint chiffon pie... looked unappetizingly dour. It called for evaporated milk, gelatin, and a premade Keebler’s Chocolate Ready Crust crust. The peppermint flavor and pink color came from melted peppermint hard candy...."

Writes Valerie Stivers, in "Cooking Peppermint Chiffon Pie with Flannery O’Connor" (Paris Review).

The recipe refers to the candy as "Starlight," and they are still sold under that name. Here's an Amazon Associates link to the product, in case you're yearning to relive old-timey hard-candydom. And here's the Keebler chocolate crust. Now all you need is a can of evaporated milk and some packaged gelatin and you can figure out how the restaurant did it. Stivers makes a posher version of the antiquated treat. She makes the crust from scratch... if you consider Oreos scratch. 

"The admission came after footage taken by a hiker circulated widely on Chinese social media, prompting consternation online."

"It showed water gushing out of pipes that had been built high up into the rock face, feeding some — if not all — of the waterfall’s flow.... 'Depending on the season, I cannot guarantee that I am in my best condition whenever my friends come to see me,' read the statement, written from the perspective of the waterfall. To make your experience of the journey more complete and to make you feel that it’s a worthwhile trip, I underwent a small enhancement so that I could meet my friends in better shape in the dry season,' it continued."

From "Tallest waterfall in China is fed by pipes, officials admit/Yuntai Falls is considered China’s 'tallest uninterrupted waterfall.' Officials admitted that its water is sourced from a pipe network during the drier months" (WaPo).

On June 3, in Yuntai Mountain, Henan, China, a man climbed up the Yuntai Mountain waterfall to explore its end and discovered that the source was actually a few water pipes. pic.twitter.com/wOkldRnnRp

— Li Jianping (@cz8921469_z) June 5, 2024

"Rahmatullah Anwari, 30, who used to grow rain-dependent wheat... borrowed money to feed his family of eight and..."

"... to pay for his father’s medical treatment. One of the villagers who had lent him money demanded his 8-year-old daughter in exchange for part of the loan. 'I have a hole in my heart when I think of them coming and taking my daughter,' he said. Mohammed Khan Musazai, 40, had bought cattle on loan.... The lenders took his land and also wanted his daughter, who was just 4 at the time. Nazdana, a 25-year-old who is one of his two wives and is the girl’s mother, offered to sell her own kidney instead — an illegal practice that has become so common that some have taken to referring to the Herat encampment as the 'one-kidney village.' She has a fresh scar on her stomach from the kidney extraction, but the family’s debt is still only half paid. 'They asked me for this daughter, and I’m not going to give her,' she said. 'My daughter is still very young. She still has a lot of hopes and dreams that she should realize.'"

From "Barren Fields and Empty Stomachs: Afghanistan’s Long, Punishing Drought/In a country especially vulnerable to climate change, a drought has displaced entire villages and left millions of children malnourished" (NYT).

"But Lake Manly is no illusion. Instead, it’s more like a ghost from Death Valley’s prehistoric past..."

"... temporarily resurrected by the fast-changing, climate-churning present. Thanks to the record-setting rain that has washed over California during the last six months, Lake Manly — which dried up thousands of years ago — has reformed on the floor of Badwater Basin, the lowest point in North America. This unlikely and exceedingly rare comeback is a message from the warming climate, which baked the region in a years-long megadrought and has now flooded it with rain...."

From "California rains resurrect a long-dead lake in dry Death Valley" (WaPo).

Beautiful photographs at the link. But you're warned not to enjoy any of this. You can't abstract beauty out of its horrible context, the apocalypse we live in today. Experience it as "churning-churning." It's a "ghost" from the human-free past delivering a "message" that we're sinful and selfish... right when you're thinking of piling into the gas-powered F-150 and barreling across the continent to take a gander at this Lake Manly.

10 pages?!!

I'm reading "75 Hard Has a Cultish Following. Is It Worth All the Effort?/Thousands of people each year partake in the 75-day program meant to build 'mental toughness,' according to its creator, but health experts caution the program may be too rigid and intense" (NYT).

Two 45-minute daily workouts. One gallon of water. 10 pages of a nonfiction book. A diet. No “cheat meals” or alcohol. For 75 days. And if you mess up, you have to start from the beginning.

Sound like a lot? It’s supposed to be. The program, called 75 Hard, is meant to build mental toughness. Some say that rigidity is what makes it great, and others say that makes it problematic...

How do you get 10 pages of a nonfiction book as a grueling challenge? That's just sad. That should be part of a program called 75 Easy. Two 5-minute daily workouts. One quart of water. Only one drink and one dessert per day. For 75 days.

I looked up the Celtic Sea, because it came up in my readings... and I was entranced....

.... by the reviews people had given it in Google Maps. To quote 4:

1. "It was wetter than I expected. Lots of fish swimming about under the surface, if you like that sort of thing."

2. "Very good sea. Compared to other seas, lakes and natural reservoirs it is undoubtedly superior. However, looking at the oceans, we need to admit that Celtic sea is slightly inferior. Nevertheless, it is a great representative of a sea.

3. "Against all the odds it does appear to be a genuine sea! I can confirm the presence of both waves and sky, with the correct one being above the other. Very tricky to get around if you don't have a boat. Minus 1 star."

4. "Lovely spot of water."

***

I was reading "Colonel Roosevelt" (commission earned). This part:

"Ever since the 1990s, when staying hydrated first became a popular health goal for the general population..."

"... certain reusable water bottles have become trends in their own right. The wide-mouthed, screw-top Nalgene — first popularized among campers and hikers in the 1970s — were everywhere in the late 2000s. ... In the following years, tall and heavy stainless-steel water carriers rose to prominence.... In 2018, Vanity Fair declared the Goop-approved water bottle with a whole natural crystal affixed to the inside it... the status symbol of the year.... In 2021, a $28 'motivational' gallon jug of water with encouragements for the drinker printed on it at each level ('12 p.m.: Keep drinking,' '2 p.m.: Halfway there!') briefly became a social-media sensation.... Around the same time... Sasha and Malia Obama... were noted as Hydro Flask users...."

From "The thirst for Stanley tumblers has reached a tipping point/Stylishly active fans have gone to great lengths to get ahold of the exclusive drinkware, one of many reusable water bottle obsessions in recent memory" (WaPo).

On this issue, I always go back to George Carlin:

I just like that his name is Jordan Character.

But here's a whole paragraph from "What’s in Your ‘Spend the Night’ Bag? A toothbrush, sure, but some people bring everything they need to feel comfortable (and a whole lot more) for a romantic overnight" (NYT):

Jordan Character is a natural health specialist in Los Angeles, so when he’s staying at a woman’s home, he brings a change of underwear, socks and an assortment of natural hygiene products that include fluoride-free toothpaste, shea butter and natural soap (“I’m definitely not washing my body with Dove”). He usually carries psychedelic mushrooms and essential oils on him, so that’s coming, too. “I bring my own water as well,” he said, adding that it’s alkaline. “I’m not trying to get caught up drinking tap water, bro.” He also brings all-natural lube and non-latex condoms: “I just bring one because I don’t want to seem like I’m there just for that.”

"Four Nigerian stowaways survived a grueling 14-day, 3,500-mile voyage across the Atlantic while perched atop a cargo ship’s rudder, where they survived by drinking ocean water and their own urine."

So says a caption to a photo in the NY Post article, "4 migrants wind up in Brazil after 14 days on ship’s rudder, where they drank own urine after running out of supplies; 2 decide to just go home"

The migrants, who hoped to reach Europe, were shocked to find out they had actually arrived in Brazil after the roughly 3,500-mile journey sailing on the Liberian-flagged vessel.... The four men — who huddled in a tiny space above the giant rudder — said they ran out of food on the 10th day of the voyage and survived by drinking ocean water that splashed around them....

[One of them] said they rigged up a net around the rudder and tied themselves to it with a rope to prevent themselves from falling off when they dozed off.... and that they could see “big fish like whales and sharks” mere feet below them.

I thought drinking ocean water is well known to be worse than drinking no water at all. We can believe their story, that they did drink ocean water, and we know they survived, but you can't leap to the conclusion that they survived by drinking ocean water.

You might guess that going from Nigeria to Brazil is a much longer ride than from Nigeria to Europe, but look it up — it isn't. It's about the same.

"But as he visited the small Ohio town of East Palestine on Wednesday, former President Donald J. Trump sought to hammer home a message just by showing up..."

"... that his successor and the man he’s seeking to replace, President Biden, had been ineffective in responding to a domestic crisis after a train derailed and spewed toxic chemicals early this month. Mr. Trump had arrived on the ground before either Mr. Biden or the transportation secretary to a train derailment many Republicans have turned into a referendum on a lack of federal concern with the needs of red-state America.... [Trump] suggested the administration had shown 'indifference and betrayal' and he talked about how truckloads of his name-brand water would be distributed to residents.... Shortly before Mr. Trump’s visit, federal officials announced that the transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, planned to visit East Palestine on Thursday.... He previously said he did not want his visit to be a distraction and would wait until the federal response in East Palestine moved past the emergency phase."

The NYT reports.

Buttigieg had said "he did not want his visit to be a distraction"? That didn't work when George W. Bush said it about Katrina (and it was more believable that he would indeed have been a distraction).

"When you ask Americans how they save energy at home, 'turn off the lights' has been at the top of the list since the 1980s."

"But when it comes to actual savings, it doesn’t even crack the top 10. Like most conventional wisdom about how to reduce household energy and emissions, much of what we believe about our homes and appliances is wrong."

Writes WaPo's climate advice columnist Michael J. Coren, in "We still use appliances like it’s 1970. There’s a better way."

I formed the habit, back in the 1970s, of turning off lights as I exited any room and only keeping lights on in rooms that were occupied. I grew up in the 50s and 60s, when it was the norm to have the lights on all over the house in the evening. We didn't think about the pros and cons of leaving them on, but I imagine that we'd have thought it would deprive us of a feeling of coziness and optimism if the house were not lit up at night. From the outside, our house and our neighbors' houses looked warm and happy and alive.

I've got 5 TikToks for you tonight. Some people love them.

1. The frog and the dog.

2. Minimalist hygiene for backpackers.

3. Community guidelines.

4. Everybody in the South knows the best way to drink water.

5. Son talks to his mom through the doorbell camera.

"Climate activists in southern France have filled golf course holes with cement to protest against the exemption of golf greens from water bans..."

"... amid the country's severe drought.... Golf officials say greens would die in three days without water. 'A golf course without a green is like an ice-rink without ice,' Gérard Rougier of the French Golf Federation told the France Info news website.... In a petition, the activists said the exemption showed that 'economic madness takes precedence over ecological reason.' While residents cannot water their gardens or wash their cars in the worst-hit municipalities, golf courses have escaped the nationwide restrictions."

BBC reports.

I've got 11 TikToks for you tonight, and it's quite possible you will love them all.

1. Detailed calligraphic artwork.

2. Gifting the Italian husband with Italian snack foods. 

3. How to style your hair. (For men with hair.)

4. "Going for a hoon in the Austrian Alps." (I had to look up "hoon.")

5. Now that's a wetsuit.

6. Crossing a difficult footbridge with a goat. 

7. "She's a rat girl, and you just fell in love."

8. A funny use of "Jump Around" (with a red scarf and a freckly horse).

9. "Are there dating sites out there for people that just don't...."

10. "... a new attitude towards life...."

11. The kid that just wanted to hear the same three U2 songs over and over in the car.