what's in your water?

The first chapter of Elizabeth Royte's Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It, the June 15 review by Lisa Margonelli, and the Michiko Kakutani review from the other day.

Goes along with something I was reading yesterday or the day before in the Economist about water pollution in India: Up to their necks in it.

Then of course there's Hurricane Dolly.

FoxNews has funny wording in their take on the bottle wars, lest we be surprised. - "There was a time when brands like Evian and Perrier conjured up images of purity and luxury. That was before bottlers everwhere got their feet wet, and drinking bottled water became a very easy and healthy way to stay hydrated and refreshed." Um. What?

This deserves a moment's pause - but only a moment. Do we see how the "images of purity and luxury" are very highly valued in the first sentence? But then! something came along to interfere with our pure and luxurious (elitist) water... What was it? Oh! this great, "very easy and healthy way to stay hydrated and refreshed"! Um. It also calls "phasing out water bottles" - "thanks to the growing green movement" - "the latest fad." Interesting. Moving on.

This woman killed her kid with water, ew.

And in a perhaps cheerier light, have you seen the Waterfalls in NYC? (You should.) The pictures of other waterfalls in New York State at the bottom of the page make me want to travel, but that will have to wait.

for further analysis

Too busy at the moment, of course (go figure), but there's an article in today's NYTimes that is interesting in light of an article I read the other day in the Atlantic. The latter is "Infectious Exuberance" by Robert J. Shiller, an economist at Yale, about the residential real estate "boom and bust" and contagious tendencies, and the former is "Fannie and Freddie Shares Fall by as Much as 50 Percent" by Michael M. Grynbaum, which is pretty self-explanatory. The end of the article reads:

"The officials involved in the discussions stressed that no action by the administration was imminent and that Fannie and Freddie are not considered to be in a crisis situation. But in recent days, enough concern has built among senior government officials over the health of the giant mortgage finance companies for them to hold a series of meetings and conference calls to discuss contingency plans."

Funny word: "health." Hm...

back in the swing

Ah, St Petersburg. Was it all a dream? It felt dreamlike even at the time, so it should be no wonder that I'm having trouble focusing on it now.

I'm having trouble focusing on anything for more than a few seconds, actually. I blame the jetlag.

Back in the city. Getting back in the swing. Getting organized. Figuring it all out. Writing again. Reading as much as ever. So much more focused than I felt before this overwhelmingly grand adventure. The future is wide open, and that's wonderful and frightening and liberating and unfathomable. Another blank page for the taking. Lists to be made, schedules to keep, deadlines to impose on myself. Let's do it.