Frazz by Jef Mallett for January 21, 2019

Everyone loves drinking from bottles.

Or, if you live in Milwaukee, WI, it’s ‘bubblers’.

My 11 year old son won’t drink water at home no matter how hard I’ve tried. He tells me none of the water he tastes is as good as the school drinking fountain water. Now I’m honestly super curious what is different between cold water at home and the fountain at school. I’ve even put water in the fridge for him thinking it’s the temperature he likes but nope….not that, according to him.

There was always that one kid in class who put his mouth directly on the spigot. I can’t imagine how many other kids did the same, but that convinced me to start bringing a bottle to school.

Be sure to see today’s great “Arlo and Janis”.

https://www.gocomics.com/arloandjanis/2019/01/21

I hope those bottles are reusable.

The new water fountains at our local teaching hospital now have spigots where you can refill your water bottle.

Institutionalized racism was just a widespread weird fad (not unlike folks these days using water bottles instead of fountains) that is now thankfully over. Got it.

We have bottle fillers on a lot of the drinking fountains around my office. People refill reusable drinking containers.

Curious if there were no fountains back then would we have segregated Dasani?

I remember from when I was young and on a summer car trip seeing “whites only” restrooms and fountains. We did not have them in Ohio and I doubt that Detroit had them.

To be fair (or actually unfair) I also remember in elementary school when lined up to drink at the fountain (yes actually) many would not want to be the first to get a drink after a black kid. Yes, the thought of what those black kids must have thought makes me cringe now.

In the schools I taught, kids routinely put their mouths on the drinking fountains. For sanitary reasons they were allowed to bring water bottles to school…and they filled them up from the drinking fountains.

The drinking fountains we had in school were like Aussie urinals (forgive the comparison). They were huge porcelain enameled cast iron troughs with up to six individual spigots. Made the line-ups move faster.

I was at the Grand Canyon a couple years ago, South Rim. We had just done a short hike from the western most end of the paved road where on our return we used the facilities. They had an elaborate setup to refill water bottles but no drinking fountain! I did have my Camelback with me but it wouldn’t fit the refill station. Boy was i pissed. Here i am wanting to stay hydrated, which they continually warn you to do, and no easy way to do it short of buying a soda or juice. Most public places nowadays have removed the drinking fountains so they can make a profit on the bottled drinks.

I’m sorry it ever happened that people of color were treated so badly by anyone ever.

Frazz is from SE Michigan, and I strongly sense that kids drinking bottled water at school directly mirrors Flint, MI and several current Detroit Public schools…

go to school with a water bottle, get some fountain water and take it home. When he complains, tell him what you did. Be sure to grab a selfie with him when you tell him.

In Flint, MI, it’s NECESSARY to drink bottled water, and in some Detroit schools, if not all of them, you cannot trust you are getting a safe drink of water from the fountains. The poorer the population, the more likely the water, and possibly, the air, and even the ground around them may well be polluted.

Is it just me, or does the bottom of Frazz’s mop/broom look like a giant ice cream sandwich?

That last bottled water craze was in the 1920’s.

I buy bottled water if I need the bottle. Then I use that bottle and tap water until I either loose the bottle or it falls apart. So far I have never had one fall apart. • I like bubblers (drinking fountains) at parks and stores. Use them all I can. If I can’t find one in the grocery store, for instance, I just take an empty bottle to the floral dept and they are always nice enough to fill it for me.