The Columnist Manifesto

After hearing about it many times over several months, I finally got a hold of Penn and Teller's Bullshit on DVD.

With the exception of the bottled water episode, I found it pretty dull as they took on one absurdly easy target after another: penis enlargement, professional feng shui interior decorators, and the like.

But the bottled water expose was informative, and the candid camera routine in a fancy restaurant in which they fob off water from a garden house out back as exotic bottled waters from around the world to pretentious diners was very funny. Interestingly, three of the diners who'd been made fools of actually laughed heartily when the truth was revealed -- an impressive display of good grace, I thought.

How the bottled water industry has managed to fool us all into thinking that their product is better for us than tap water -- when most of it is worse, and much of the rest actually is tap water -- is just scary.