Nobody Knows Anything

Welcome to Diane Patterson's eclectic blog about what strikes her fancy

Archives for January 2006

Seltzer wars

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seltzer.jpg I bought myself a seltzer bottle for Christmas. Isn’t it pretty?

At first, I couldn’t make it work. Then I noticed the cartridges not only said “Cream” but also said NO2 instead of CO2. (I had those cartridges because that’s what the chick at Williams-Sonoma sold me, okay?) I took the cartridges back, got the ones labeled “Soda,” and discovered they work much, much better.

Normally I drink carbonated water mixed with a slug or two of Torani syrups, available in nearly every flavor you can think of (and even more, if you buy the full-sugar ones — currently i use the sugar free ones flavored with Splenda). I hope adulterating perfectly good water with syrup removes it from my “glasses of water per day” total, but I can’t say that with certainty.

The best thing about making the bottle of soda is, of course, adding the CO2 to the water. You add the cartridge to the cartridge holder, carefully screw it in… and when the seal on the cartridge is pierced, WHOOMP! The water bubbles up. Then you shake the bottle a few times (to distributed the CO2?) and you’re good to go.

Now that I have used the seltzer bottle (successfully), I can give you a side-by-side comparison of how the bottle stacks up against a bottle of carbonated water (say, Crystal Geyser) bought at the store:

Seltzer bottle Bottle of water
Attractiveness High None
Start-up cost $50 inc. in price of bottle
Price per liter .50 (assuming box of cartridges at $5.00) .88 (assuming 1.25 liter bottle at $1.10)
Sodium As much as your drinking water Low, but definitely there
Fizziness On par with beer On par with soda
Trash left over One small cartridge per liter(recyclable) One plastic bottle per 1.25 liters (recyclable)
Liberal guilt assuaged Much None

Clearly in the short run it’s much more cost-effective to keep buying the carbonated water at the store, but I much, much prefer using the seltzer bottle. It tastes better, there’s no sodium, and best of all, I’m not filling up our recyclables container every week with four or five bottles.

So if you’re like me and a)like carbonated water and b)like to make your own Italian sodas with Torani syrup, I highly recommend picking up a seltzer bottle. There are both cheaper ones and bigger ones out there, depending on your needs.

Fraudulent authors

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Evidently JT Leroy, child prostitute and AIDS victim, never really existed. John Scalzi thinks this is no more than convoluted ghost-writing. Susie Bright feels much, much differently about the situation:

For readers, famous author JT Leroy’s hoax — that “he” is really a “she,” that a middle-class 40-year-old woman has been impersonating the life of a lumpen gutter-whore child — must make for great reading. Memoir, shmemoir, right?

But if you’re an author, an editor, a publisher — or worse, a friend — to someone who bullshit you up one side and down the other, it’s not cute. It’s not irrelevant. It’s a cruel con, straight up, and the whole writers’ community suffered for it.

She goes on to describe her relationship with JT — apparently Bright got (and published) JT’s first work — and clearly she and a lot of other people were taken in. I feel really bad for her: I know how hard some online journalers on the ‘net took it to find out other journalers were frauds, and there was no money, time, personal contacts, and business to fuck up there.

Of course, there were the online journals set up to detail leukemia victims, or what have to you, in order to get money. And a lot of people were hurt by that too.

The most hysterical detail Bright relates is the last plea she got from JT:

Then, in October, JT wrote and asked me to help fundraise for his son’s private French immersion school, Lycee Francais La Perouse, the most prestigious and expensive grade school in San Francisco.

THUD.

I had just come from a Hurricane Katrina fundraiser before I opened my mail. JT’s plea to support his dream of higher education seemed… just plain high.

In the years since I first knew him, JT had made film and book deals galore, with celebrities fawning at every gesture. I felt like writing him and asking if he’d like to donate to my gas bill, which is suffering more of a hit than Lycee Francais’s current endowment fund.

But I didn’t write back. I didn’t want to say I felt ignored and used, because I felt silly that I had ever thought it was anything more than that.

Lycee Francais La Perouse? Hahahahaha. The lil’ street hustler sure had moved up in the world.

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I seem to remember reading a long time ago that James Frey was a big fraud — in fact, I was surprised to see on Amazon he’d been chosen by Oprah. Perhaps the difference now is that The Smoking Gun has the proof?