What a sight: the author of The Morning File standing in his bathroom Thursday night brushing his teeth with the liquid product he had once considered the most useless ever marketed.

No, I was not brushing my teeth with non-alcoholic beer! Sheesh.

Rather, the cobweb-covered gallon containers of emergency, store-bought water had been brought up from the basement for use during the great East End Water Crisis of 2007. For reasons eluding a mind that couldn't fathom high school science, a pipe that broke on Oakland's North Dithridge Street created a void in faucets miles away.

So once more, thousands of Pittsburghers made a run on supermarket bottled water. For half a day or longer, many of us had difficulty bathing. (Did the rest of you notice? You were just too polite to say anything, weren't you?) It made this guy wonder how it is in all of those end-of-the-world movies, when people don't have running water any longer, they don't all look a lot more disgusting than they do.

Water battle is lost

I can't take credit for calling bottled water the greatest marketing scam of all time. That was Rocky Anderson, mayor of Salt Lake City (unofficial motto: "Nobody's Cleaner, Duller or Prouder Of It."), in refusing to use public money for the product. "We just need to get away from these wasteful, environmentally disastrous consumer habits that have been developed and get back to drinking water out of the tap," Mr. Anderson said.

He was simply stating what I'd been thinking for a long time, ever since Evian began showing up here and there in the 1980s with an oh-so-chic attitude about it. This author has long lived by the mantra that he won't pay to drink water any more than he'll pay to breathe air. And for that matter, you know what you can do with your fee-for-play tennis bubbles. We'd like to put parking costs into that category as well, but that's a tougher nut to crack.

We were non-negotiable on this water matter, however, until young females in the household started requesting it. It's easy to carry with you, they noted. It's healthier than soft drinks, they pointed out. I tried to tell them that water is overrated. In fact, it's downright bland. It's pointless, other than for the small fact that you'd die within several days without it.

As young females are wont to do, however, they've won the argument. We now have little bottles of water in the house, constantly left behind on some coffee table or desk as though they're household knickknacks now. A few dozen milliliters are always left for good measure.

Let's be clear about this

PepsiCo Inc. recently agreed to start admitting that its Aquafina bottled water has nothing to do with the mountain stream depicted in its logo. Its bottles up to now have been labeled "P.W.S." which I always thought meant "purchase without sanity." The company will now spell out the true meaning, however: "public water source." This is a step in the right direction, letting people know that they're basically buying something they could obtain at their kitchen sink.

The bottled water business has been growing about 10 percent a year, to wholesale sales of $11 billion in 2006. Individual serving sizes are where the biggest growth is, not the gallons for emergency use. Just think what we could have done with that $11 billion if we'd been smarter. (Give that money to the Port Authority, for instance, and they could build a tunnel under the Monongahela River to the South Side, instead of just the North Shore, and then one under the Ohio.)

The biggest drinkers

We went to the International Bottled Water Association Web site to look for information about just who are all these people consuming the product. Its survey statistics were a bit old, from 1999, but they showed that women were more likely to be consuming bottled water than men, and adults 18 to 54 were far more likely to be consumers than those older.

It's no wonder, then, that older adults are said to have a lot more disposable income. As for the gender difference, is there anything that women don't spend more on than men, other than the Spice channel?

A call to arms

A group called Food & Water Watch is heading a campaign to drop this national fetish with pretty little water bottles with attractive names. We can't vouch for them, but we'll tell you what they say at www.fwwatch.org:

"Bottled water wastes fossil fuels and water in production and transport, and when the water is drunk the bottles become a major source of waste. It takes more than 47 million gallons of oil to produce plastic water bottles for Americans every year. Eliminating those bottles would be like taking 100,000 cars off the road and 1 billion pounds of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.

"Each one of those bottles required nearly five times its volume in water to manufacture the plastic and may have caused the release of nickel, ethylene oxide and benzene. Then, rather than being recycled, 86 percent of them are thrown away."

You got that, little water girls in my household?