Does this water taste funny to you?

Published 11:39 pm Wednesday, May 20, 2009

Eau de Golden

Astronauts aboard the international space station now can wet their whistles with water made from their own urine.

Any leftover water will be sent back to Earth, bottled and sold to raise money for the space program.

Russian cosmonauts have a similar system, except their unit makes vodka instead of water.

Towering foreclosures: Suburban tract houses aren’t the only distressed properties in this recession. Skyscrapers whose owners defaulted on their loans now sell at drastic discounts at auctions. One 40-story building in Manhattan sold for just $100,000.

Just think — you could have owned a skyscraper for less than you’d pay for a 850-square-foot dump with mold on the walls.

As always, though, reality smashes the reverie. It probably would cost a hundred grand a week just to run the elevators and air conditioning units required to make the steel-and-glass structure viable for human habitation.

Fad or fact: Is this a new era of frugality? Perhaps, but personal finance columnist Michelle Singletary says she doubts Americans will permanently change their free-spending ways.

One good thing about permanently living with less: Perhaps the media would then stop calling citizens “consumers.”