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Bottled Water: The Hoax

Watched a great Penn & Teller “Bullshit!” episode a few months ago on the bottled water industry, which confirmed what many of us already suspected: Bottled water is not more pure than tap water, nor more healthy, and the bottled water industry is environmentally nasty. Not to mention the fact that most people can’t tell bottled water from tap water in a blind taste test (in the episode, they crafted some fancy “high end” water labels and affixed them to empty plastic bottles, which they then proceeded to fill with water from a rubber garden hose in the back alley; the footage of diners at a fancy restaurant being invited to comment on the taste of the “gourmet” waters was priceless). Loved the close-up of the Dasani bottle label, which proclaims proudly “Source: Milwaukee municipal water supply.”

Because Penn and Teller cuss so much (well, Penn does), and because their shows often seem skewed or riddled with personal agenda checkpoints, I sometimes find their credibility dubious. So it’s nice to find an op-ed in the New York Times coming to exactly the same conclusions.

Nor is there any health or nutritional benefit to drinking bottled water over tap water. In one study, published in The Archives of Family Medicine, researchers compared bottled water with tap water from Cleveland, and found that nearly a quarter of the samples of bottled water had significantly higher levels of bacteria. The scientists concluded that “use of bottled water on the assumption of purity can be misguided.”

Oh, and there’s the small matter of highway robbery:

Ounce for ounce, it costs more than gasoline, even at today’s high gasoline prices; depending on the brand, it costs 250 to 10,000 times more than tap water.

Bottled water is the ultimate consumer suckerpunch, yet remains phenomenally popular. Do people simply not know it’s a consummate waste, or do they know and buy it anyway? The whole phenomenon is beyond me.

Music: Mike Watt :: Maggot Brain
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Over-Eager RBLs

Experimenting with RBLs in the mail server to catch messages originating from known spammy SMTP servers before they hit the SpamAssassin engine. Highly effective, but some of the RBLs cast too wide a net. For example, hapless users on major networks like Comcast may be assigned an IP recently used by a spammer (or by a virus-infected Windows computer), and end up on an RBL. Result: Legit mail inbound to Birdhouse customers gets bounced to confused but legitimate senders.

Had three such incidents with bl.spamcop.net in the past month, so have just dropped it permanently from the RBL list. In its place, added an RBL in China and another in Korea. These seemed to work well, but today I heard from a customer who was running a legit PHP mail script, which suddenly started timing out. Removed the new RBLs and the problem went away. Lesson: the RBLs being consulted must not only be accurate, they must be fast.

Aside from a few false positives, the RBL experiment has been very successful — server load down, straggler spam down. But getting it right is like tuning a fork.

Music: Les Baxter :: Oasis Of Dakhla
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Call Out Gouranga

Gouranga Thumb In celebration of antiweb’s 10th anniversary, used Comic Life to create a non-contiguous digital comic book cut-up based on images by Amy and myself with text excerpts from the antiweb mailing list.

The comic (if you can call it that — don’t go looking for continuity here) was on display at the anniversary happening, running full-screen on a 20″ iMac (perched on crushed velvet no less, though that part was not planned). Looked much better full-screen than it does online; the goldanged interweb has its limits.

Prepared the image portion first, added text later. This was a tough call – I actually think it works much better visually without the text. But the text did add dimension, and it wouldn’t have had much relevance to antiweb without it (thanks to everyone whose words I lifted).

The title of the piece comes from that peculiar recurring spam that doesn’t sell anything at all, proclaiming simply “Call Out Gouranga Be Happy!” Looks like more explanation for the chant is available online now than existed when I first posted to antiweb a few years ago looking for Gouranga insight.

Found Comic Life totally addictive, though it did take more time than it probably appears to get the look I wanted — choosing templates, experimenting with image filters, selecting word/thought balloons and captions, setting gradients, panel ordering, sizing, etc. But would love to use the app to tell an actual story sometime.

Music: The Fiery Furnaces :: Gale Blow
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Double Barrel

According to the Supreme Court (Grokster case), “software companies can be held liable for copyright infringement when individuals use their technology to download songs and movies illegally.” But the logic is inverted when applied to the gun industry. According to White House spokesman Scott McClellan, “The president believes that the manufacturer of a legal product should not be held liable for the criminal misuse of that product by others.”

So the corporation is liable for criminal uses of a product by its customers when that product involves copyright. But the corporation is not liable for criminal uses of a product by a customer when that product is a firearm (and the stakes could be human lives).

Daily Kos: What’s the common logic holding these disparate concepts together? Massive corporate special interest money. Welcome to your government of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations, where a pirated copy of “Hollywood Homicide” is bigger threat than an actual Hollywood homicide.

Not making a point here about copyright or gun laws per se’, but about hypocrisy, messed up priorities, inconsistent logic and double standards.

via Weblogsksy

Music: The Fiery Furnaces :: Leaky Tunnel
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Berkeley’s Silent Menace

Geodog on how the Prius has become the new Volvo, and the danger to bicyclists and pedestrians of having a lot of silent cars on the road (owners say the car is “stealth mode” when runnning on battery power):

With the Prius, you don’t get any warning — the car literally sneaks up on you. After nearly being run over several times in the last month, and again this night on the way back from the Berkeley Cybersalon, I did a little research and turned up quite a few mentions of this problem, the scariest from a blind person’s perspective … the Toyota engineers need to find a way to make the car nosier, even if it involves something as silly as recordings of internal combustion engine noises that the car plays through an external speaker when the car is in battery mode.

While I’ve certainly noticed the local upwelling of Pria (is that a legitimate pluralization? probably not), I personally haven’t had close calls with them. But then I haven’t been biking as much lately due to knee problems. I think the problem is offset by the fact that the kind of person who buys a Prius is likely to be a more considerate driver to begin with. I have a lot more close calls with drivers of SUVs, and with people talking on cell phones (regardless the model of car). Remember too that all cars have become much more quiet in the past decade — it’s gotten to the point that a vehicle from the 1970s seems loud in contrast.

Music: Caetano Veloso :: Genipapo Absoluto
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michaelpollan.com

Birdhouse Hosting is proud to welcome michaelpollan.com, the website of environmental journalist and J-School professor Michael Pollan. “A contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine, Pollan is the recipient of numerous journalistic awards, including the James Beard Award for best magazine series in 2003 and the Reuters-I.U.C.N. 2000 Global Award for Environmental Journalism.” Site neatly designed by Birdhouse affiliate designer Leena Pendharkar.

Music: Ken Nordine :: Gold
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With This Bone I Do Thee Wed

What better way to show your lifelong commitment to another than by wearing a piece of their endoskeleton as jewelry? London scientists allow couples to extract chips of bone and infuse the samples’ osteoblasts into a baked glass ceramic composite. The bone/glass composite is then grown into a lattice structure closely resembling actual bone, which can then be carved into handsome rings. The symbolism is lovely (at least it strikes me that way) and so are the rings. A nice way to avoid supporting the slavery of the diamond industry, too.

Music: Dave Van Ronk :: God Bless The Child
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Gray Shirt

Talking with Miles this evening about colors. I ask him what colors of clothes go well together.

“A gray shirt.”

Hmmmm, I think. Conservative tendencies. Maybe the makings of a GAP kid. Sigh. I press on: “And what color pants go with a gray shirt?”

“Pink and orange and green and blue.”

“All of those colors together in one pair of pants?”

“Mmmm hmmm.”

“Polka dots or stripes?”

“Polka dots AND stripes!”

“With a gray shirt?”

“Mmmm hmmm daddy, with a gray shirt.”

Keep in mind this is coming from a kid who has never expressed one iota of interest in his clothes, other than to favor boots shaped like alligators.

Music: Mission Of Burma :: Eyes Of Men
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We Jam Econo

Went to watch a documentary about The Minutemen, We Jam Econo, with Roger tonight. Archived gig footage interleaved with interviews — Watt driving his old white van around San Pedro plus dozens of conversations with musicians from in and around the early 80s SoCal punk scene.

The movie reminds you how awkward it is to use the word “punk” to describe The Minutemen — they get lumped in due to their energy and their label and their place in time, but really shared very little with typical punk bands — no mohawks, no punk uniform (check D. Boon’s ridiculous shoes for proof), little in the way of punk attitude. The Minutemen were never crass. They were more complex than that – political without being blunt, musically complex without making “music for musicians” (not that I think art music is bad, just saying The Minutemen weren’t about that). Artful without being arty. Humble, totally honest, real people making music that sounded like nothing that’s come before or since.

The interviews are great – a virtual who’s who of the SST scene, “including John Doe, Thurston Moore, Colin Newman, Ian MacKaye, Jello Biafra, Richards Hell and Meltzer, and a big chunk of Black Flag’s large revolving cast: Greg Ginn, Henry Rollins, Keith Morris, Kira Roessler, and Dez Cadena” (from Pathetic Caverns).

Not enough time spent on Double Nickels, easily the greatest album ever made in the history of humanity (don’t challenge me on that, even though I mean it). But compensated for it with some jaw-dropping acoustic footage (who knew?) — including Hurley on bongos.

Run, don’t walk.

– Interview with filmmaker at the Seattlest
– New Yorker review

Music: The Yardbirds :: Happenings Ten Years Time Ago
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Milk and Cookies

Wondered why I was suddenly getting comments on the old Miles Stuck in the Cat Door and e-i-e-i hop hop videos. Then discovered that Miles has been linked to from Milk and Cookies, with the caption “Crawling baby gets stuck in the cat door and sadistic mommie makes him clean up his puke while videotaping it.”

Funny, we were mildly concerned when we originally posted that video that someone would not get the joke (the deck-cleaning clip was shot days before the throw-up clip; I temporally transposed them in Final Cut to make a funny). No one ever did comment on it, so I assumed everyone got it. Now, two years later, we’re waiting for a knock on the door from Child Protective Services.

Music: Carlton Alphonso :: Belittle Me