Waterblogged

The Waterblogged.info team finds itself in the unusual position of praising a local (San Francisco) television station for its coverage. Taking a break from petty crime, fires, and traffic accidents, San Francisco’s ABC affiliate, KGO offers A Look at the Desalination Process, an informative video update on the state-of-the-art of desalination efforts in water-challenged California. Of particular interest are the numerous small desal plants that pepper the coast (see map at left grabbed from the video) that have been deployed to test the concept. They work, but they are currently delivering a meaningless minuscule percentage of the water requirements for the communities they serve. KGO does not gush about the potential; this water is and will be very expensive and otherwise problematic (think lots of dead and otherwise threatened coastal and sea life) for the foreseeable future.

We will dutifully add this resource to our ever-growing page of desalination resources: Getting Serious with Waterblogged.info: Desalination.

Recently, in April 2008, The (U.S.) National Research Council released an important report about the current state of desalination in the U.S. titled Desalination: A National Perspective.

Navigating from the handy-dandy book icon below, you can read it online or download it as a PDF. You executives out there can also read or download the executive summary, and there is even a podcast summary. For some reason, items on the web that are designated FREE in capital letters are not, but in this case, it’s lower-case free, meaning you can read or download the entire document without paying a nickel. (If you insist on spending money, you can buy the paperback version for the strange sum of $57.83.) Waterblogged.info has addressed desalination here and here, and maintains and updates the soon-to-be-famous Getting Serious with Waterblogged.info: Desalination, a comprehensive package of online resources on the topic—pro and con and every position in-between—with annotated links to articles, white papers, PDFs, diagrams, and videos. It’s also free in the lower-case sense of the word.

Desalination: …
Read this FREE online!Full Book | PDF Summary | PDF Report Brief

WTF??!!! Are we bipolar or somethin’ over here at Waterblogged.info??? One day we’re ranting against bottled water (Well, not just one day: another rant, oh so cleverly wrapped in a pretty package of ironic enthusiasm here) and now we’re recommending that you buy as many bottles as you can for $20 dollars a pop??? There’s gotta be a catch, right???

Indeed, there is. The catch is that we’re not talking about Bling H2O, which will set you back one crumpled portrait of Andrew Jackson for a 375-ml. bottle and ostensibly earn you the approbation of a certain kind of person. Nor are we recommending any of the other luxury bottled waters, which you can learn about in the video below.

Let Scott Harrison, founder of Charity, explain why buying a $20-dollar bottle of water isn’t as self-indulgent as it sounds. Or, possibly even better, let Simon Willows and Beck school you.

Atlanta Water Shortage points to this Popular Mechanic’s story, The Ten Pieces of Infrastructure We Must Fix Now. We’re bursting with self-involved excitement over here at Waterblogged.info because four of the 10 imminent disasters are water related!

Our copy editor is now running three office pools: one to pick the day that Kentucky’s Wolf Creek Dam will collapse and inundate nearby Nashville, Tenn. and surrounding communities, and one to pick the date that an earthquake will severely damage the levees in California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta, (and here) to flood miles of surrounding farmland and compromise the drinking water of 66 percent of California’s population.

Think you have the inside scoop on when the Herbert Hoover Dike will fail and allow Lake Okeechobee’s contents to flood the homes of the 40,000 or so lakeside residents and maybe even contaminate all of southern Florida’s water supply? Hey, lay your money down and fill out a bracket! Experts say that each year there’s a one-in-six chance that it’s going to happen!

And no story about potential water disasters would be complete without mentioning water- and leadership-challenged Atlanta, Georgia, which is losing 18 percent of its water from leaking pipes! That’s treated water, my friends (as the brain-cell challenged Republican presidential candidate might say). We discussed this abhorrent fact in part 2 of our oft-cited It’s a Drought, Stupid series.

Why, fret Waterblogged.info fans around the globe, have there been so few posts lately? One word: ennui.  Frankly, we’re getting just a wee bit bored with water, a topic that has truly been done to death.

The fact is that we are really print people at heart—ink in our veins and all that. So, after a long and of course querulous all-night brainstorming session—complete with the big white pad on the easel, acetous colored markers, congealed pizzas (one vegetarian and the rest pepperoni), warm cokes, and cold coffee, (but no goddamn bottled water)—we decided to launch a print magazine! We all agreed that it would be new, daring, edgy, trendy—and above all, not about water.

Oh yes, and cool, very cool, cool enough to be acknowledged, dare we hope, by such arbiters of cool as ubercool.com. (Hmm. . .the linked article is about water. Is it possible that Waterblogged.info, by rejecting water first, is ahead of the cool curve on this one?)

At about 3:30 a.m., possibly inspired by the warm cokes, it hit us: What could possibly be cooler than ice? And thus Icescape, the monthly magazine for all things that are frozen water, was conceived–but unfortunately not born. At this juncture, we should be proudly announcing the inaugural issue and inviting you to the big launch bash we’d planned. Unfortunately, circumstances beyond our control—mainly the impossibly impoverished imaginations of potential investors—have forced us to indefinitely postpone our beloved Icescape project. (Yeah, yeah, yeah, we’re putting it on ice, thank you, thank you.)

We know–we’re disappointed, too. As consolation, we offer the following list of ten cool facts about ice.

1. Ice is the name given to any one of the 15 known crystalline solid phases of water.
2. The most recently discovered form of ice, Ice XII, was found just a little over a decade ago.
3. In 400 BC Iran, Persian engineers had already mastered the technique of storing ice in the middle of summer in the desert.
4. Black ice is not black. Because it is almost totally free of the air bubbles that give common ice its gray-white color, it is transparent.
5. Vanilla Ice’s real name is Robert Van Winkle.
6. Why ice is slippery is still a hotly (or coldly) debated issue.
7. At extremely low temperatures such as those reached in Antarctica, ice loses its slipperiness.
8. Ice is tricky (and dangerous).
9. A growler is smaller than a bergy bit.
10. Ice is usually snorted, swallowed, or inserted anally. Huh? Oh, wait, that’s “ice,” not ice. So item No. 8 in this list advises you to stay off the ice, and this one advises you to stay off the “ice.”

The wrenching wails emanating from the copy editor’s direction cut through the normal bustling din of the Waterblogged.info press room like a sharp cutting implement of some sort. “WTF?” the entire editorial team thought as we surrounded his cubicle. Did his chihuahua, Marmaduke, die? Did he lose at that goddamned video game he plays when he’s supposed to be hunting down typos?

Sniveling and shaking, he pointed to a news story on his screen. “Look at this!” he screeched. “First they tell us to drink eight glasses a day! Then they tell us not to! First it’s great for our health to drink a lot of water, and then suddenly it isn’t! Then we’re supposed to drink tap water, and then they tell us its full of pharmaceuticals! Now they’re saying that tap water is as good or better than bottled water. Does that mean all that money I’ve spent on Evian was wasted? “I feel so jerked around and confused! What the hell am I supposed to do-whoo-whoo-whoooo-whoooo-whoooo?

The last word–that sounded not unlike an owl on meth–was broken up (as we helpfully indicated with hyphens), by sloppy sobs and snotty snorts accompanied by the arrhythmic heaving of his bony little shoulders.

Touched by the stripling’s total self-absorption—and making a mental note to revive our dormant employee drug testing program—we handed him a tissue and cooed comforting there-theres and now-nows. He opened his eyes, which he’d squeezed shut to block out the harsh reality of his life, and was momentarily startled at the sight of so many tissue-offering hands. He selected one, blew his nose, but continued to whimper and shake uncontrollably.

Luckily, the editor-in-chief had just been to a workshop on how to take a tough-love approach to in-house mental breakdowns. She put her cigar down and with one hand grabbed him by his black emo T-shirt with the other gave him two smart snap-out-of-it slaps. She had the tough part nailed.

She pulled his wide-eyed face close to her three-day stubble. “Listen copy editor [not his real name], there are a lot of people on this planet who can’t make the choice of whether or not to inhale gallons of water all day like a race horse training for the Preakness,” she said ever so softly. “Their choice is what dusty path to take to find a filthy little puddle of bacteria-infested brackish water to give to their emaciated child. Their dilemma is ‘Should I let my baby die of thirst now or of diarrhea later?’ They don’t have to worry about pharmaceuticals in their water because they don’t have medicine and they don’t have any water. They don’t have to agonize about which bottled water is the perfect accessory for their lifestyle, because they don’t have lifestyles and did I mention that they don’t have water?”

“So, your choice is either move to one of those countries where life won’t be so gee-williebillers complicated or stop your whimpering and get your skinny little ass back to work,” she quipped. Squeezing his shoulder firmly but not enough to bruise, she spun his chair around toward his monitor. He must have felt the love, because he immediately grabbed his AP manual and started industriously flipping through it. As the boss turned she noticed our admiring glances and humbly said, “What are you looking at? Get the hell back to work!”

The truly essential green site, Treehugger, published the guide, How to Green Your Water, way back in 2006, and by golly if it doesn’t still seem relevant now, so many, many months later. It’s a fantastically well-organized, handy, and dandy resource for learning water basics (and not-so-basics) as well as how not to be a water hog.

We’ve embedded the guide’s intro and navigation below. Tips for drips, anyone? That and other easy ways to conserve in the Top 10 tips. Just what the heck is the water cycle, anyway? See Getting techie. (Hint: It’s not a setting on your washing machine.) And speaking of washing machines, see the “Dig deeper” section for appliances designed to save water. Perk up your party patter by memorizing the By the numbers section, and we guarantee you will not go home alone. What’s up with greywater and blackwater? Top 10 tips again. And while you’re there, learn why you’re an idiot if the big problem in your life is choosing just the right bottled water to match your lifestyle. (BTW, For some reason the intriguing Questions you weren’t afraid to ask link is dead.)

(What’s Snow White got to do with this? Nothing except that the guide’s home page has a link to an article purporting that “. . .Walt Disney was a secret environmentalist, inserting subliminal messages into his cartoons.”)

Introduction to and navigation for How to Green Your Water:

There is no resource more precious than water. There is also no resource that is misused, abused, misallocated, and misunderstood the way water is. Safe drinking water, healthy and intact natural ecosystems, and a stable food supply are a few of the things at stake as our water supply is put under greater and greater stress. The picture might look grim, but opportunities to be more efficient abound. Many people have had water-saving etiquette pumped into them at one point or another, so hopefully we can make a good case for conserving the stuff with practical, everyday water-saving strategies as well as some more high-tech approaches.

Guide Navigation

Waterblogged.info’s “web guy,” whom we’ll call “Michael,” because he insists that that’s his name, recently confessed that he seldom reads our posts because they’re “depressing.” Hey, sorry not to be more upbeat about global droughts and polluted water, “Michael!”

But honestly, our last effort at a more sunny and chirpy water-related blog, Ain’titawonderfulwaterworld.com, folded because it was hard to find anything to write about that didn’t relate to whitewater rafting or scuba diving.

But “Michael” has a point: Our posts tend to be relentlessly dreary. In an attempt to lure him and other fun-lovers back into the Waterblogged.info fold, we offer this trendy and frolicsome respite from the usual gloom and doom.

Water is hot!
Bottled water, that is. According to the ubercool trendspotting site, Ubercool.com:

The U.S. bottled water business has jumped 800% in the past 20 years, reaching US$9 billion a year and going from virtually nowhere to the No. 2 U.S. beverage, behind soft drinks. At its current growth pace, bottled water will surpass soft drinks in the next 10 to 15 years, says Beverage Marketing.

In fact, bottled water is the U.S.’ fastest-growing “refreshment beverage,” says the research firm, with 2006 bottled water consumption increasing 9.5% from the year before. Beverage Marketing predicts that by 2011, bottled water’s share of the liquid refreshment beverage market will be 29% — while soda — which currently holds about 42% — will dwindle down to 34% by 2011.

Water is sexy!
Bottled water, that is. And only some bottled water. Take Bling H2o, which, as of this writing, costs US$20 a 375-ml bottle (Caveat: That’s for the entry-level Limited Edition Vintage Pink Crystals, Baby Bling, 375ml, on frosted glass). Bling H2o was the brainchild of Hollywood producer Kevin Boyd, who noted that among the myriad cool bottled waters flaunted [his word] by the denizens of Hollywood studios,

. . .none truly made that defining statement. Bling H2o was fashioned to make that defining statement.

And as he frankly states, Bling H2o is not for everyone:

“The product is strategically positioned to target the expanding super-luxury commodity market.”

Whoooaaaaa! World Water Day 2008! And, as usual, Waterblogged.info—where everyday is Water Day—is fashionably late! We didn’t post yesterday because the entire Waterblogged.info staff took the day off to celebrate at the many parades, marches, exhibits, mock water-war shoot-outs, hippified be-ins, teach-ins, die-ins, and drink-ins—not to mention the wet and wild after-hour parties, shindigs, soirees, bashes, clothing-optional panel discussions, clothing-required swimming parties, underwater hip-hop summits, midnight scuba diving, and of course, the posh, black-tie, celebrity, invitation-only, really-huge-scary-guys-patting-you down-at-the-door-for-concealed-water-guns galas that took place all over the San Francisco Bay Area!

Stephen Colbert reveals the truth behind the water hype!
Though thoroughly exhausted—and bloated from sampling too much of the free-flowing non-bubbly straight up from the tap—we make up for not posting yesterday by directing you to a new water blog, Misublog. To make up for not posting frequently enough, Misublog’s CEO, board chair, editorial director, and author, Laura Makar, posted four segments from the Colbert Report that, in true Colbertian fashion, put water in perspective. In 30 minutes or so, Colbert demolishes so-called scientists and experts and their so-called facts and figures, demonstrates that water is overrated and can be effectively substituted for by eating Doritos, and offers his contribution to the bottled water controversy: Aqua Colbert.

Maude Barlow, that is. And no, she’s not; nor is water expert and waterblogger extraordinaire Michael Campana insinuating any such thing. Waterblogged.info’s policy is to resort to inflammatory and sensational language to attract attention, just like the major media.

Michael’s discussion/refutation of some of Barlow’s assertions are compelling and, if nothing else, will dissuade you from arguing with Michael about water unless you are armed with charts, statistics, and an advanced degree in hydrology from a reputable institution of higher learning.

If you’re like most of the population and not interested in learning anything potentially depressing and just trolling for a good laugh, head on over to Michael’s personal blog, Campanastan, and check out the funniest photo on the internet.

The entire editorial staff of Waterblogged.info would like to thank Campana for providing all the information for today’s post, saving us hours of work and allowing us to get back to our day gig before the boss catches us.