The South Coast Water District is considering an ordinance that, among other things, would prevent restaurants from bringing water to customers who haven't requested it. The law is intended to stymie water shortages or something, but screw that. My pet peeve: Restaurants cheaping you out on water and forgetting you asked for it. This will just add one more needless step in the journey to quench thirst after nachos. Shame on you, Water District, for trying to prevent a catastrophic drought.
In November of 2000 for OC Weekly, I wrote "Waste Waterworld: Will Poop-to-Tap Plan Raise a Stink?" Oh, the comments I got from water officials for using words like "pee," "poop" and "the Ewww! Factor" in a piece about the Orange County Water District and Sanitation District's planned $600 million Groundwater Replenishment System. Well, the system survived my snarky reporting, went on to win awards and is now producing the water unwittingly slurped up by tourists operating drinking fountains at
Included in the land- and water-conserving Omnibus Public Land Management Act signed into law today by President Obama is a bill providing $6 million in federal funding to help finance future phases of the Orange County Groundwater Replenishment Project--a.k.a. the "toilet to tap plan." The project takes sewage water, cleans it well beyond public-health standards and then infuses it into central Orange County's groundwater aquifers, where it will remain until being drawn up and further fil
Blue Gold: World Water WarsEarth Day is Wednesday, but the Newport Beach Film Festival (NBFF), in partnership with the Newport Bay Naturalists and Friends and the Orange County Parks Department, celebrates Sunday, April 26. A program of Earth Day-appropriate short films, curated by
the festival's co-director of shorts programming Dennis Baker, screens as part of an all-day event featuring
booths, games, exhibits, music and more from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. that day at Peter and Mary Muth
Interpretive
John Huston channels William Mulholland and Jack Nicholson clueless Angelenos in Roman Polanski's classic Chinatown.UC Irvine's revelation that it would host free "water-and-film" events Friday night and Saturday morning and afternoon immediately produced visions of a giant kiddie pool plopped in front of a movie screen erected in the middle of Aldrich Park. When it was further disclosed that the first flick screened would be the 131-minute-long Chinatown, visions of pruny appendages danced i
Before Blue Gold: World Water Wars screened at April's Newport Beach Film Festival, Irvine-based indie filmmaker Sam Bozzo vowed it would be his first and last documentary because it proved so arduous to make.At least Blue Gold, which is about the world's water shortage and based on the ground-breaking book of the same name by Maude
Barlow and Tony Clarke, would go on to win the festival's jury prize for best documentary. Now the doc kicks off tonight's Cinema Sage Hill, a free monthly
film s
