More ephemera

cold-waterOne of the things I will miss about win­ter is cold water. In Den­ver dur­ing the win­ter, water comes out of our taps at just above freez­ing. I love that for drink­ing — but not for our water heat­ing bill.

It was really good, but I’m not rich

metromint

I admit. I’m a sucker for new products.

So Metro­mint was an easy one for me to try — I like mint, and I don’t like sug­ary drinks (very often). Plus, it was on sale for about a third off the list price.

Ver­dict? Good. Nice clean taste. The bot­tles said “-6 degrees” (Spearmint) and “-8 degrees” (Pep­per­mint). That’s a bit con­fus­ing — are you sup­posed to chill them to that tem­per­a­ture for max­i­mum enjoy­ment? (If you were, there would have to be some anti-freeze ingredient.)

Final ver­dict? Don’t buy. Why?

1. The bot­tled water prob­lem of your hav­ing to dis­pose of or recy­cle the bot­tle and the envi­ron­men­tal costs of trans­port­ing the water to your store. (Pipes do it cheaper — if you live in North Amer­ica, anyhow.)

2. Try my much cheaper ver­sion here. Not as cool-looking, but it does taste good.

Why the cup?

macd-water-cup

A few days ago, our fam­ily splurged and enjoyed a Mac­Don­alds lunch. As usual, we all got water. For us, the big rea­son is sav­ing $5 or more.

This was the first time I had seen cups specif­i­cally for water. Pos­si­ble rea­sons for this are:

  1. To keep the cus­tomers hon­est. If another cus­tomer saw some­one fill­ing their water cup with soda, the fraud­u­lent filler might feel guilty.
  2. To make the water drinker feel self-righteous. They might want to brag that they are drink­ing a health­ier drink than others.

Do you have any addi­tional ideas why they may have done this?

Bottled water

I have preached about the evils of bot­tled water here and here. But if you go to the iTunes store, you can see a free 6-minute video that says it bet­ter than I can. Search for “bot­tled water” under the iTunes U section.