Saturday Chum Stew: Water, Vegas, Revolts, and Death. A Typical Week.

[cahwyguy]

Saturday, and time to clear out the news links before a busy weekend. Hopefully, you’ll find something of interest in these:

• “Whiskey is for drinking but water is worth fighting over”. Four interesting articles related to the drought in California. Anyone who has used an automated toilet has run across the first waste of water: Phantom Flushing. Here’s an op-ed that opines that we should go back to non-automatic flushes, which will save water. The next scourge: unmetered households. Here’s an article about how a few communities are using a loophole in the law to fight water meters and keep their flat rate. The third scourge: bottled water. Want that Crystal Geyser that is advertised so heavily? Siskiyou County Water. But here in LA? We’re conserving so well we don’t need additional restrictions (for now).
• Death of an Icon. Two articles related to the death of the Riviera.  The first is a really nice piece about the last days of the Riv. The second is an opinion by Penn Jillette (who is doing his part for Vegas history by selling “The Slammer”) about how what is built in Vegas blows up in Vegas.
• Art is Revolting. No, not in that sense. I mean standing up for their rights and fighting back. At first, it was the intimate theatre community. Now, the entire USC First-Year MFA class has quit. They say it best: “We are a group of seven artists who made the decision to attend USC Roski School of Art and Design’s MFA program based on the faculty, curriculum, program structure, and funding packages. We are a group of seven artists who have been forced by the school’s dismantling of each of these elements to dissolve our MFA candidacies. In short, due to the university’s unethical treatment of its students, we, the entire incoming class of 2014, are dropping out of school and dropping back into our expanded communities at large”
• Death is Complicated. Here’s another complication: How do you keep up your websites after you’re dead? After all, you can’t pay the bills, you can’t update the registration, you can’t update the site. But they might be a vital piece of web history.
• Coffee May Be Bad For Your (Financial) Health. Do you drink coffee? Do you drink Starbuck coffee? Do you use the Starbuck app? If you said yes to all three, disable auto payments immediately.
• Coloring Your View. The infamous dress is back. More specifically, there’s an interesting science report about how the environment we work in colors our view of how we color the dress.

 

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