That's right, folks. There's a new war on the horizon. A war against a fascist, manipulative regime. The leaders are named Fiji, Dasani, Poland (Springs), Aquafina...


Let me just share some facts I pulled out of a recent article in Fast Company magazine with you:

- 24% of the bottled water bought it simply tap water repackaged by Coke and Pepsi (that's Aquafina and Dasani - yep, it's just purified tap water).
-If the water we use at home cost what even the CHEAPEST bottled water cost, our monthly water bills would be over $9,000.
- Americans use up 50 billion plastic water bottles per year. We throw away 38 billion of those water bottles a year - that's over $1 billion in plastic and think about how much garbage 38 billion bottles creates.
-Americans spent $15 billion on bottled water last year. If I had .001% of that, you'd be reading the blog of a millionaire.
- Fiji Water produces more than a million bottles a day, while more than half of the people in Fiji don't even haven reliable drinking water (in fact, 1 billion people in the world don't and over 3,000 children die a day from diseases caught from tainted water)
- The average American drinks 28.3 gallons of bottled water per year.


Now, I'm not against bottled water at all. I think it's a FANTASTIC (if not essential) idea, especially in places where water isn't reliable due to bacteria and the like (which isn't a problem in the US anymore as it is was when bottled water first became popular here), but there is a limit. Why do we as Americans pay for and drink so much bottled water when nearly all of us have water in our homes that costs a fraction of that bottled water? Because it doesn't taste quite as good? Because we're too stupid and lazy to spend 35 seconds filling up a bottle ourselves when we're thirsty? Filling a bottle with our own tap water costs us less than a penny.

Granted, we have even more problems with pop and the amount of waste that causes (which is about double that of bottled water) - but the difference is that Coke and Mountain Dew don't flow from taps throughout our homes or out of free public fountains. The sad thing here is that this is all our choice - the business here is booming because we keep drinking it.

It's a luxury here in a America, a stupid, wasteful accessory, a trendy status symbol, even worse than buying a coffee at Starbucks for $3.00 when you can get the same thing at the gas station across the street for $0.79.

I guess this war shouldn't be on the companies, but on those people who spend hundreds of dollars a year on bottled water when it is completely unessential to them. Next time you go to buy a bottle of water, ask yourself, "Is this 16 ounces of water really worth a buck?"

Then punch yourself in the face for even considering it.

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Danny: Forget it Nick... it's Sandford.
-Hot Fuzz

Labels: Rambling

Samuel returned from Afghanistan just two days ago after a 7-month tour and he decided to have a little get together of twenty or so friends at his house to celebrate his return. It was filled with stories (old and new - Sam had some great ones to tell obviously), poker, some intense Apples to Apples, and a rediscovery of a certain movie from our childhood thanks to Sam's sister Meri.

Yes, that's right, Meri found One Lane Bridge, a movie we made that Sam and I have been trying to track down for something like six years. I was in 7th grade when this was made, Sam was in 8th, and the other half of Jonny B² was in 9th grade when we made this masterpiece. You can even see the original website we made for it right here, along with the original official premise for it:

Born into a world of prejudice, Jon Burdick stars as Detective Jesk Atler who vows to have revenge on the zesty Eddie Winslow (Jon Beardsley) after he kills Jesk's significant other, Smiley (Jessica Alba). Atler teams up with seasoned detective, Dr. Eyebrow Jones (Justin Medlin), to crack the case... even though he suspects the detective is the crimes true mastermind. Based on an amazing real-life story - Burdick has never been so toilsome, as he goes all out in his attempt for vengeance, and finally expose the crooked cop.

Needless to say, we were pretty pumped and I'm going to make sure to make about 30 DVD copies of it so it never gets lost again. In the meantime, I'm awaiting the arrival of the third movie in the trilogy, the epic Slow Children Playing, that was Jadot Moosman's senior project. Then we're going to have to have a red carpet premiere and show all three movies in the trilogy in a row.

Really though, being as young as we obviously were, some of the humor doesn't hold up as well as I had hoped, but most of it was actually pretty clever considering our average age was 13. Not to toot my own horn, but I'm throughly impressed by what we were able to pull off with a little handicam and the two VCRs that we used to edit the thing into some sort of sequence - I still vividly remember how grueling of a process it was.

As soon as I get it converted to DVD and can somehow figure out how to convert it to .AVI, I'll be uploading onto YouTube and it'll be on here. You can count on it.

In other news, Sara and I have vowed to stay away from chain restaurants (as in dine-in restaurants - I don't think I could abandon Arby's) and hit up the more local, independently owned restaurants. We decided this after a great meal we had at a small Italian restaurant on 18th street called Hector's. I already have a few places in Erie I've never been to lined up in my mind: Serafini's, Matthew's Trattoria, Paper Moon... any other suggestions are welcome, of course.

Speaking of food, why hasn't Ramen noodles solved the problem of starvation in the poorer parts of the world? I mean, come on... at $0.12 a pack you could give a MILLION people a meal for a measly $120,000 - and if you go by the actual serving size (I imagine their stomachs wouldn't be able to handle a whole pack of noodles anyway), that's two million meals for $120,000. Americans spent $15 billion on bottled water last year (I have a blog post coming on this very topic soon, so stay tuned) - do you know how many people that could have fed with Ramen noodles?

And last but not least, I don't think Dane Cook is very funny. In fact, I think he's pretty unfunny. I just needed to get that out there.

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I once saw a forklift lift a crate of forks. And it was way too literal for me.
-Mitch Hedberg

Labels: Rambling