Bottled Water Famous Quotes

Because I live in south Florida I store cans of black beans and gallons of water in my closet in preparation for hurricane season. I throw a hurricane party in January. You’re my only guest. We play Marco Polo in bed. The sheets are wet like the roof caved in. There’s a million of me in you. You try to count me as I taste the sweat on the back of your neck. I call you Sexy Sexy, and we do everything twice. After, still sweating, we drink Crystal Light out of plastic water bottles. We discuss the pros and cons of vasectomies. It’s not invasive you say. I wrap the bedsheet around my waist. Minor surgery you say. You slur the word surgery, like it’s a garnish on a dish you just prepared. I eat your hair until you agree to no longer talk about vasectomies. We agree to have children someday, and that they will be beautiful even if they’re not. As I watch your eyes grow heavy like soggy clothes, I tell you When I grow up I’m going to be a famous writer. When I’m famous I’ll sign autographs on Etch-A-Sketches. I’ll write poems about writing other poems, so other poets will get me. You open your eyes long enough to tell me that when you grow up, you’re going to be a steamboat operator. Your pores can never be too clean you say. I say I like your pores just fine. I say Your pores are tops. I kiss you with my whole mouth, and you fall asleep next to my molars. In the morning, we eat french toast with powdered sugar. I wear the sugar like a mustache. You wear earmuffs and pretend we’re in a silent movie. I mouth Olive juice, but I really do love you. This is an awesome hurricane party you say, but it comes out as a yell because you can’t gauge your own volume with the earmuffs on. You yell I want to make something cute with you. I say Let me kiss the insides of your arms. You have no idea what I just said, but you like the way I smile.

Every dish I cooked exhumed a memory. Every scent and taste brought me back for a moment to an unravaged home. Knife-cut noodles in chicken broth took me back to lunch at Myeondong Gyoja after an afternoon of shopping, the line so long it filled a flight of stairs, extended out the door, and wrapped around the building. The kalguksu so dense from the rich beef stock and starchy noodles it was nearly gelatinous. My mother ordering more and more refills of their famously garlic-heavy kimchi. My aunt scolding her for blowing her nose in public. Crispy Korean fried chicken conjured bachelor nights with Eunmi. Licking oil from our fingers as we chewed on the crispy skin, cleansing our palates with draft beer and white radish cubes as she helped me with my Korean homework. Black-bean noodles summoned Halmoni slurping jjajangmyeon takeout, huddled around a low table in the living room with the rest of my Korean family. I drained an entire bottle of oil into my Dutch oven and deep-fried pork cutlets dredged in flour, egg, and panko for tonkatsu, a Japanese dish my mother used to pack in my lunch boxes. I spent hours squeezing the water from boiled bean sprouts and tofu and spooning filling into soft, thin dumpling skins, pinching the tops closed, each one slightly closer to one of Maangchi's perfectly uniform mandu.

If bottled water is bad for the environment and isn’t healthier than tap water, does it at least taste better? Probably not, although it’s wholly subjective. Blind tastings have even shown that tap water scores higher than most mineral waters. The wine magazine Decanter ran a famous blinded taste comparison with twenty-four bottled waters in London in 2007 using wine-tasting experts. Good old London tap water came in at third, costing less than 0.1p per litre. The losers included New Zealand bottled water, which ranked a dismal eighteenth place despite coming from an extinct volcano and costing 50,000 times more than tap water.

Consider this famous passage from Galileo: Shut yourself up with some friend in the main cabin below decks on some large ship, and have with you there some flies, butterflies, and other small flying animals. Have a large bowl of water with some fish in it; hang up a bottle that empties drop by drop into a wide vessel beneath it. With the ship standing still, observe carefully how the little animals fly with equal speed to all sides of the cabin. The fish swim indifferently in all directions; the drops fall into the vessel beneath; and, in throwing something to your friend, you need throw it no more strongly in one direction than another, the distances being equal; jumping with your feet together, you pass equal spaces in every direction. When you have observed all these things carefully (though doubtless when the ship is standing still everything must happen in this way), have the ship proceed with any speed you like, so long as the motion is uniform and not fluctuating this way and that. You will discover not the least change in all the effects named, nor could you tell from any of them whether the ship was moving or standing still Galileo’s point is that the absolute velocity of a system of bodies is not detectable by any means available to a scientist who is part of that very system, because the relative motions of the bodies are unaffected by their overall velocity. Only by relating the bodies to some external system can the motion be detected

cost and technical difficulty are not the primary reason so many modern cities have been unable to provide water to their inhabitants. Again and again, the biggest obstacle has been what social scientists call governmentality and what everybody else calls corruption, inefficiency, incompetence, and indifference. French cities lose a fifth of their water supply to leaks; Pennsylvania’s cities lose almost a quarter; cities in KwaZulu-Natal, the South African province, lose more than a third. So much of India’s urban water supply is contaminated that the lost productivity from the resultant disease costs fully 5 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product. More than thirty North American cities improperly test for lead in their water, including, famously, Flint, Michigan, where bungling local, state, and federal officials have forced residents to drink bottled water for years.

Snow was a storyteller as well as a scientist, so he deployed anecdotes to put faces to his number in the hope of persuading his medical colleagues of cholera’s waterborne spread. There was a woman, “the widow of a percussion-cap maker,” who had moved from Soho to the West End some months earlier but had not lost her taste for Broad Street’s water. She had arranged for bottles of it to be brought to her by cart. There was a delivery on August 31. She drank from it then and the next day, and she shared it with a niece who lived in Islington, another district still untouched by cholera. Both died. Seven workmen making dentists’ materials at numbers 8 and 9 Broad Street were “in the habit of drinking water from the pump, generally drinking about half-a-pint once or twice a day.” Cholera killed them all—but two people who lived in the same building who did not draw their water from the pump experienced only bouts of diarrhea. Both lived. A factory at 37 Broad Street provided its workers with barrels of pump water and lost eighteen out of a staff of two hundred. A brewery down the road gave its seventy men malt liquor; no one drank water; none fell ill. Tellingly, the Broad Street outbreak did not single out the abject poor. Rather, Snow wrote, “the mortality appears to have fallen pretty equally amongst all classes, in proportion to their numbers.” He concluded that “out of rather more than six hundred deaths, there were about one hundred in the families of tradesmen and other resident house holders.” The most wretched people in the parish, those locked in the workhouse, were almost entirely spared. That building was bordered on three sides by streets in which the outbreak raged, but lost only 5 of its 535 inmates; if it had seen the same mortality as those richer households, Snow wrote, “upwards of one hundred persons would have died.” What had saved them? The workhouse had its own pump, “and the inmates never sent to Broad Street for water.” This was a refutation of the argument that disease explicitly targeted the poor, either as punishment for their ineradicable sins or because their poverty exposed them to miasmas those above them avoided. Snow kept going, seeking out the details of death after death, and those of seemingly anomalous survivals. He finished his review of the first week’s deaths in just four days, delivering his results to parish authorities on Thursday, September 7. The next morning the parish took perhaps the most famous single action in the history of public health: it ordered that the handle from the Broad Street pump be removed. If Snow was right, the poison that had ruined the district would be cut off at its source, and the epidemic would end. It did.