The strange tale of the Brita water filter

It was a dark and stormy night. Thunder rolled over the land and lightning shot from the sky incinerating trees, cars and unlucky people caught out in the worst storms since records began. Out of the dark came a hulking shape. It was transparent, and water sloshed from side to side as it moved down the road, but no! Disaster struck, a little pebble made a small crack in the jug and it’s life force, the magical water seeped into the ground and the transparent walls of the Brita jug finally fell silent.
The thunder rolled on …

Well, I had to make a post about water filters exciting in some way eh? Now, here’s what I really wanted to tell you.

We’re on our second water filter at home. The first one was a Brita jug, which worked perfectly fine until a small crack appeared in the bottom. Filters lasted slightly less than a month before it became obvious the water wasn’t as pure.

My litmus test is my bedside glass of water. If it’s still drinkable in the morning then the water filter works! Without a filter, water in Blarney where I live tastes fine out of the tap, but left overnight it has a distinctly metallic taste.

As I said, the Brita jug was fine, but water leaked out of that slowly but surely and it was time to replace the jug. Little did I know how much the Brita was costing us ..

A few days later we were shopping in Tesco and I remembered the water filter. We made our way to the hardware section of the store, and discovered quite an array of shapes and sizes, not only from Brita, but also Tesco’s own brand. I compared prices and the Tesco filters were half the price of the Brita ones, so buying a Tesco branded water filter jug was a no brainer.

Back home, the Tesco jug works great. The filter seems to last longer and my glass of water can still quench my thirst in the morning a month after installing it. If you’re going to buy a water filter, go do yourself a favour and buy the Tesco one. It’s cheaper and works just as well as the Brita one.

If on the other hand you still have a Brita jug, the Tesco filter may fit it if your jug uses the long and round filters. That’ll save you about €3 a month and as they say, “every little helps” 🙂

No, I’m not paid by Tesco for this. I think it’s too good a bargain to pass up if you use a water filter at home! Normal WordPress, tech and “popular culture” blogging will resume shortly!

PS. ‘course the Brita filter might have been doing more work because the water was leaking out of it, and thus clogging up the filter more quickly!

Health food firms told to "Prove it!"

It’s about time for this to happen. Food companies have been claiming X, Y and Z about their products for long enough. An article in the Sunday Times goes on to say that, “FOOD companies that make false or unsubstantiated claims about the health benefits of their products will be forced to withdraw them under a new European Union crackdown.”

One of those products listed in a table that accompanies the paper version of the article is the baby food Aptamil. There is very little proof that it helps a baby’s immune system. Looks like Milupa were quick off the mark changing their packaging.

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The prominent label, “Supports your baby’s natural immune system” is now missing on the new packaging. Score one for consumers!

Now, if you’ll excuse me, Adam needs annother feed. Typing one handed takes ages!

While on the subject of feeding babies, there is an Islamic Fatwa that says adult men can be breast fed. Strange, but read more here

Harney forces Cork midwives to resign

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The Minister for Health, Mary Harney, has a lot to answer for. Nurses, midwives, consultants and other staff in the newly opened Cork University Maternity Hospital (CUMH) are stretched to the limit coping with the pressure of expectant mothers and babies from the original three maternity hospitals in the city.

Cork University Maternity Hospital

We spent over two hours in a stuffy, crowded and very warm waiting area to be seen by a midwife and a consultant this morning. It was in stark contrast to the empty hallways and calm of the hospital just two weeks ago when we were given a tour of the facilities and offered a glimpse of a gleaming high-tech maternity environment. Pregnant women, partners and children waited in the sweltering heat while staff were run off their feet. The waiting area was unfortunately too small, there weren’t enough seats, and pregnant women had to make do by leaning against the walls of the corridors while waiting to be seen.

Despite the pressure, staff were as nice as always. Midwives were considerate, helpful and professional, but when asked about how things were going I heard that 2 had resigned and 4 had taken sick leave. As well as being short staffed to begin with, the remaining staff are even worse off now. Some workers are pulling 11 hour days.

Did I forget to mention that this 75 million Euro hospital doesn’t have air conditioning? Can you imagine the heat and mood in a small area where the only air comes from 2 slightly ajar windows and from internal corridors? It wasn’t nice. At least the two expensive flat screen LCD screens on the walls kept us occupied with day time TV courtesy of TV3. Oh yeah, that’s what we need.

Thanks to Mary Harney’s bullying tactics last week the hospital opened a week late on Saturday last. She had threatened to find a different use for the building if midwives didn’t accept her terms and move to the new hospital. Midwives and consultants protested that staffing levels weren’t high enough and I bore witness to that shortage this morning. Even the computer system there is broken and not expected to be working until this evening. No appointments could be made so women had to come on a first-come-first-served basis to the morning clinic. One woman we met there had been there since 8.30am. We arrived at 11am. Apparently it was even worse on Monday.

Teething problems with a new hospital? Perhaps, but if Mary Harney wanted the hospital opened a week previously shouldn’t those problems have been sorted out then?

Truly, healthcare is a vocation. I couldn’t do it. The midwives and staff deserve all the support they can get.

Self diagnose with Google

Everybody and anybody who has an illness, a pain in the leg, a hurt somewhere, will use Google to find out what ails them. There is an inherent danger in that, but if you use a search engine that way, and believe the first result, then good luck to you, The Darwin Awards may need another category.

The rest of us go to the doctor, the dentist, or whatever health professional is appropriate. What if your company health plan depended on using Google to diagnose? That’s what Catbert, the evil director of Human Resources did today in this Dilbert cartoon. Arc Welder anyone?

If by chance you do suffer a tooth ache, then a Google Search could pay dividends, at least for short term relief. My toothache post has been insanely popular for a couple of years now and a few people have learned something about dealing with the pain. I found that swishing Vodka around in my mouth helped a lot. It says it on the Internet, it must be true!

I wonder what Britney Spears Googled that told her to shave her hair off? Poor girl.

Choosing a memory foam mattress

Yawn. The mundane things in life are top of my agenda today. We’re looking for a new mattress and considering how much time is spent asleep in bed it’s criminal not to buy the best you can afford.

From research it appears that memory foam mattresses are the best to go for. I would certainly hope a new mattress would help my sore back! Tempura mattresses have been recommended to us but they’re hard to buy in Cork. Casey’s Furniture have them but they’ve always been over priced in their city center location. Another brand I have come across is Visco and it appears to do the same job. According to one salesperson they’re firmer than Tempura mattresses but I need to ring around a few more places before we make up our minds.

If you have one of these mattresses I’d love to hear about how comfortable they are. Try searching for any information on either brand and you’ll only find are online-stores trying to flog you one!

This page is better than most however. Here’s what they say about Visco-elastic mattress, which I presume applies to Tempura too.

  • Body heat reacts with the foam to soften it.
  • The mattress then moulds and re-moulds to your body’s contours.
  • Provides excellent support and enables natural movement during sleep.
  • Helps to maintain correct posture and align spine horizontally when lying on your side.
  • Hypo-allergenic with anti-microbial properties.

Off to town shortly and out with the credit card..

January 3rd 2007 – we went into town this afternoon and tried a few places before buying a bed in Swan Beds. It’s a memory foam mattress. A bit pricey but less than Casey’s were looking for. Hopefully it’ll be delivered next Wednesday!

Chosen To Suffer

A mentally ill and severely depressed patient walks from morning mass at a convalescence home. She has been living here for many months because her elderly parents cannot cope with her at home.

She stops the priest who has just offered up the body and blood of Christ in holy mass and asks him, “why am I suffering?” His reply both startles her and frightens her, “You are chosen to suffer for everybody else on this earth”.
She asks him if she will get better and his reply is a short and terse, “I don’t know”.

Where is God? Where is hope?

“You are chosen to suffer for everybody else on this earth”.

Bupa to leave Irish market

I can just imagine the cheers and celebration going on at VHI HQ this afternoon as it was announced that Bupa, the second largest health insurer (with 22% of the market) is going to pull out of the Irish market because of risk-equalisation.

Two things really annoy me about this decision:

  • When they set up shop in the first place they knew that risk equalisation was inevitable. It’s a side effect of how the Irish health insurance market works. Everyone pays the same premium, the incumbant VHI has older and more costly members and risk equalisation meant compensating VHI. They should have planned realistically for it although how one can plan to compensate another company a sum of money larger than one’s own entire profits is beyond me.
  • Why couldn’t they have come up with a more imaginative solution. If VHI had simply given Bupa a percentage of their elderly members to even out the age spread of their memberships then VHI wouldn’t have had a leg to stand on and risk equalisation wouldn’t be an issue.

I’m a Bupa member as is my wife. A friend of mine works for Bupa in Fermoy. We’re all sorely disappointed at the decision today. There’s still Vivas Health but I wonder what their plan is to cope with the huge payouts VHI will want off them in a couple of years.

The company is blaming the move on a scheme known as risk equalisation – which it says compels it to pay €1 million every week to compensate other insurance providers for covering older consumers.

The company claimed the move would force it to hand over €161m to its rival over three years, even though its profits for the period would be just €64m.

Michele linked to a newsletter written by Martin O’Rourke, the boss of Bupa Ireland. As I expect the Bupa website will disappear sooner rather than later and this message with it, I’ll copy/paste it here after the jump as a record of what evils a monopoly does to an industry.

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Continue reading “Bupa to leave Irish market”

Running to catch up with the world's fittest man

I still haven’t read the couch to 5k plan I linked to over two years ago, but someone else did take turning 30 seriously: Dean Karnazes. At the age of 30 on a night out with the lads he decided to run 30 miles. He had no special training, but he says, “and I just got this feeling. When the clock struck midnight I told them I was going to run 30 miles. I guess I was having an early midlife crisis.”

Dean hasn’t stopped since, he runs 70-80 miles a week and at the age of 43 has just completed 50 marathons in 50 days! Read about his story written by a gasping Jeremy Taylor who struggled to keep up with him on his 23rd race.

I turn 31 in a few days time, I think I might manage walking home from Blarney village a mile away, with a following wind.

How to make cocaine

Cocaine use is ruining many lives, the social side effects of paying for an expensive addictive habit ruins society but it’s also disgusting all the crap they use to make cocaine. As it’s an illegal drug you have to take what you get: petrol, cement, calcium oxide, ammonia, H2SO4 and of course coca leaves. This video takes you through the process of from picking the leaves, chopping them, spraying them wth the above chemicals and filtering. Ugh. Everyone should see this video. It might stop someone experimenting with it in the first place.

The Swearing Lady has been reading about Cocaine use in Ireland and the UK. It’s being cut with carcinogenic chemicals to increase yields so on top of the chemicals above drug users are really f*cked. (via and I’d swear Damien linked to the movie a few days ago too)

Edit: the video that was here is long gone, but here’s a text description of how to make cocaine. Reminded me of Breaking Bad reading that.