June 27, 2008

• I usually drink soda. (terrible, I know, but I likes ma flavas). However, when I do drink water, it's gonna be filtered tap. I can't justify the cost of a $1.50 for a freakin' bottle of water, but am in the "logicallyiknowitsfinebutewwwwwtapwater" camp, so will only drink something out of a Brita filter if given the choice.
• That was a poorly written article, even by CBC standards. I think it said that if I drink bottled water I'm uneducated but financially well-off.
• That was a poorly written article, even by CBC standards. I think it said that if I drink bottled water I'm uneducated but financially well-off. In other words, rocket's got STUPID MONEY!!!!
• I freak out the neighbourhood kids by drinking out of the garden hose. I'm super-educated, I'm smarter than Spock.
• We have well water here, so i drink directly from Mother Nature's teat.
• I drink mostly bottled water. For starters, it's ultra-convenient; there's no excuse for me to get dehydrated when there's a case right by my work desk. Second, I think there really is something to the ribbed design of the bottles and the splashing inside the bottle that aerates it and makes it taste better; a glass of water tastes flat to me.
• The ribbed design makes it taste better. and you KNOW it's NSFW.
• ARGH! I've been ripnrolled!
• The best water in the world comes out of the garden hose straight from my well! I do buy bottled water on occasion. Often it's just the convenience when I'm in the car traveling. Chlorinated city water is teh suck. You realize of course that you pay much more for plain old water in a plastic bottle per gallon then you do for gasoline? AHHHHHH! Cool, sweet, wonderful Idaho ground water, pumped straight out of the ground, as much of it as I like. I sure don't have money, and I'm not all that smart, but I'm damn lucky compared to a lot of the world.
• from the dispenser thingy on my fridge. and i'm collidge edjamacated, too, but not particularly well off.
• Hmm, my option isn't on their test. I have well water - but unlike the rest of you lucky well water-drinking monkeys, mine is not actually potable. It has a high bacterial content (agricultural runoff), is very hard, and contains a great deal of sediment. Once every few weeks, I drive all my empty gallon jugs to Safeway and use their "tap water but we cleans it real good" machine. It costs about .50/gallon to refill them. From the gallon jugs I decant into my own water bottle. Which is made of plastic and I guess will kill me with cuticle cancer or something. So my answer is... um... tap water? I mean, technically.
• Technically, most bottled water is tap water anyway, as I am given to understand...
• Tap, although filtered to reduce the chlorine. Can't justify the cost of bottled at home and since I'm trying for the carless urban existence, I don't feel like shlepping it back from the store either. (As an aside, I wonder about the relationship between truck/van/suv ownership and bottled water drinking.) We've a water cooler at the office, so there I drink bottled.
• You realize of course that you pay much more for plain old water in a plastic bottle per gallon then you do for gasoline? Hmm...I can get bottled water for 99 cents a gallon here. Wish gas was that cheap. I use tap water, but when I lived where there was a well that delivered water full of floaty things, I did get bottled water. No filter was going to make that stuff safe.
• I used to drink boiled tap water (Beijing's isn't up to being drunk straight) but then a friend left town and bequeathed me his water cooler so now I drink distilled stuff from big plastic jugs. That's right, I said big jugs.
• I buy one bottle of water every few months and refill it from the tap daily until I lose the bottle or decide it's been drunk from by my germy offspring one too many times, then I buy another. All that aside, I don't drink enough water and am regularly dehydrated, as the throbbing headaches attest.
• I'm 100% non-filtered tap here. The only precaution I take is to let the tap run for a good two minutes to make sure that I have a fresh, and cold, supply from the main street-level feed. You don't want to be drinking the stuff that's been sitting idle in the pipes for who knows how long. I'm still alive. Though, I prefer to chill the tap water in the fridge before drinking. Bottled water, phooey! Unless of course you live in one of those cities such as Abiezer. Having just returned from Jakarta, I didn't even dare to use the tap water there to brush my teeth (as I had in the past, but always ended up with stomach problems).
• I'm a silicon based life form so I only drink neat hydrochloric acid.
• I do chance it for teeth brushing smt, and actually had a journo friend who swore it was fine to drink, but it's full of all sorts of industrial stuff I fear and very hard. The kettle's so much cleaner now I may be saving on gas what I spend on water, and my morning coffee tastes infinitely better.
• Well, the family home in Jakarta does not have city-provided water (which is quite unreliable). Rather, it comes from a ground well - - and if you take a look at the backside of the home, there is basically a river of sewage alongside it (it's not raw sewage per se, but let's just say it smells pretty darned close to it, and it has a bubbly quality similar to soda that's been standing for a good hour or so). Alas, I don't believe that the tap water is safe for even brushing teeth. Washing hands, bathing, OK - and that's about it. Now, about that coffee...
• Filtered tapwater here - too much copper and iron in the wellwater to drink it straight.
• Drinking the tap down here in the sunlands. A bit hard, but better tasting than most municipal supplies I've had. Read somewhere that it does technically have a bit too much arsenic for federal standards, but that can't be bad for me, right?
• Doesn't copper and iron make it taste sweet, fish tick?
• Tap, although our water supposedly contains a bit of lead due to old pipes (40% of the water that's pumped in the pipes is lost somewhere) and it has quite a chlorinated taste. But I drink a lot of apple and orange juice as well. Made from frozen concentrate and... tap water. I'm too well educated to drink bottled water. Especially the reverse osmosis kind that is more like destilled water and has absolutely nothing in it. I regularly refill my specially imported red water bottle with tap water and will probably die soon.
• I drink tap water at home, and bottled at work... though those britta commercials are making me feel guilty about how long the plastic bottles will stay around, so I think I'm going to buy a filter pitcher and keep it in the fridge at work from now on. Plus, they raised the price to 1.50 a bottle, and poop on that.
• MonkeyFilter: I drink directly from Mother Nature's teat. MonkeyFilter: That's right, I said big jugs. MonkeyFilter: it's not raw sewage per se, but let's just say it smells pretty darned close to it MonkeyFilter: poop on that Meredithea: Ugh! That's the last time I buy bottled water then!!
• Admittedly, I drink bottled water from time to time -- Perrier, Badoit, mare's beloved Spa Rood -- all the bubbly stuff, to take the place of pop. I'm looking for a home carbonator, but all I can find are ones that need special cartridges, which doesn't help the landfills any. But that's the exception. Usually just tap water.
• I think I remember seeing some expose on tv years ago showing how most municipal tap water has less bacteria than bottled water. Certainly, Toronto has excellent drinking water. It comes from the deep parts of Lake Ontario, which consist of water directly melted off glaciers (and still there thousands of years later, well, until we get done with it). Even when it goes back into the lake, it's been filtered a lot of times through sand. No clorine anymore - don't know if they used to have it. I do find the demographics of bottled water very interesting - using bottled water is correlated with income, but inversely correlated with years of tertiary education. I've never heard of that before. I supose as a poor person with a post-graduate degree, it's obvious that I would drink tap water, though like many others I will buy the occasional bottle in order to get a bottle to keep refilling. I even drank Cambridge (UK) water, which tastes like it was used to wash a blackboard first. (Kind of true - all of the local springs are in the chalk hills). But Waterloo (Ontario) water - that I can't handle. It's awful. It's not quite as bad as some well water I tasted once up north (which I think had a lot of sulfer or something), but still eekch.
• Carbonated water doesn't count - not until you can get a carbonator on your tap. That would be awesome - I don't know if I would ever drink anything else. Or at least not for a week or two. At which point I would be so sick of carbonated water I would want still. But I'd still do at least a week straight. (I wonder what carbonated coffee would taste like? Can you boil carbonated water?)
• Denver tapwater for me. Have a two year-old Arrowhead bottle I keep filling. Freeze it, toss it in the backpack, and I'm good to go.
• There's a Swedish company that will give you carbonated water straight out of the tap, not sure if it's available elsewhere in the world.
• I freak out the neighbourhood kids by drinking out of the garden hose. I'm super-educated, I'm smarter than Spock. LOGIC DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY! [/Morobo] ----- Tap water here. San Francisco's tap water is much better than anything out of any bottle. I do buy club soda, though, since I enjoy fizzy water every now and again. jb - I think the expose you might be thinking of is an episode of Penn & Teller's Bullshit! in which they send off tap water for analysis and find that it has much higher levels of arsenic and other things than the tap water. They also do some man-on-the-street tap water taste test in NYC and nearly everyone picks the tap water as tasting better. A lot of this falls under the "If you pay for it, then it really is better to you." psychological rule. This post at Mind Hacks links to two studies, one showing that simply describing a wine as more expensive results in people saying it taste better and the other one showing that people value advice they pay for over free advice even when they know the sources are providing identical advice. That's my theory on bottled water, really. If you pay for then it MUST be better? Right? RIGHT?!
• Mostly tap but occasionally buy a six pack of bottled water. Most days I fill several plastic bottles and chuck them in the fridge. We have a Brita filter, but I'm too impatient to wait for the water to come through.
• Sorry roryk, we got awful thirsty waiting for your answer. No more gin left, but there's still a bottle of tonic water around here somewhere...
• (That's 'cause GramMa likes her G&Ts light on the T!)
• I ordered a G&T a little while back, it being summer and all, and the bartender had no idea what it was. It's sad when you have to explain what makes up a Gin and Tonic...
• You're joking.
• I never joke about booze.
• But you did order that awful, awful drink...
• Business lunch.
• Did you actually call it a "G&T"?
• Sorry, I meant- DID YOU ACTUALLY CALL IT A "G&T"?
• What's wrong with calling it a G&T? *raises finger to bartender*
• Jeez, who deosn't know how to make a Gatorade & Tequila?
• I wonder how well "bottled water consumption" correlates with "aggressive purchase of status symbols."
• (Err... sorry, confused the Preview and Post buttons again.) Not pointing fingers at fellow monkeys who have owned up to regular consumption of bottled water. My comment is sparked by having overheard two very fancy ladies with expensive accessories comparing their favorite brands of bottled water.
• MonkeyFilter: fancy ladies with expensive accessories
• GramMa, for goodness sake, but some tonic in with that gin before you post!
• Thash, allrigh', Lara, I'm purfackly able to shee the keys... MonkeyFilter: put some tonic in with that gin before you post Ashusuly, I like to think of my drinkie as more of a vegabbul. Afer all, it hash baobabbab and gooshberry. I've never really tried Whitley Neill, but it does sound intriguing.
• mmm, tasty!
• Yes, I actually called it a "G&T". I maintain that bartenders should know that most unqualified drunks deal in shorthand, to save time.
• Well, now, see, a bartender who doesn't know what's in a "G&T" is simply less of a retard than a bartender who doesn't know what's in a "Gin and Tonic." This information is vital to my understanding of just how retarded the bartender was.
• When I said it was a Gin and Tonic, he then asked how it was made. So there -- a retard on both scores.
• Was this a bar or a group home?
• A bit of both, as the bar was in Canada.
• The Captain Renault Song By Tom Waits Warm beer and cold women, I just don't fit in every joint I stumbled into tonight that's just how it's been all these double knit strangers with gin and vermouth and recycled stories in the naugahyde booths with the platinum blondes and tobacco brunettes I'll be drinkin' to forget you lite another cigarette and the band's playin' something by Tammy Wynette and the drinks are on me tonight all my conversations I'll just be talkin' about you baby borin' some sailor as I try to get through I just want him to listen that's all you have to do he said I'm better off without you till I showed him my tattoo now the moon's rising ain't got no time to lose time to get down to drinking tell the band to play the blues drink's are on me, I'll buy another round at the last ditch attempt saloon warm beer and cold women, I just don't fit in every joint I stumbled into tonight that's just how it's been all these double knit strangers with gin and vermouth and recycled stories in the naugahyde booths with the platinum blondes and tobacco brunettes I'll be drinking to forget you lite another cigarette and the band's playing somethin' by Johnnie Barnett and the drinks are on me tonight
• He probably thought you wanted a Jian Tea, Cap'n. I've been in English pubs staffed exclusively by young Australians who look puzzled when asked for 'half a bitter'. But I forgive them because they are far less slow, curt, and offensive to the eye than the traditionally skilled old scrote who knows how to pour a White Shield and all that.
• MonkeyFilter: less slow, curt, and offensive to the eye than the traditionally skilled old scrote
• Marge: "I'll just have a coffee please." Aussie bartender: "Beer it is!" Marge: "No, coffee." Aussie bartender: "Beer." Marge: "Coffee! C-O-F-F-" Aussie bartender: "B-E-E-"