My brother has one of those water-filtering pitchers and I honest to God cannot tell the difference between water before it goes through the filter and water after. Do they actually work? I can see them not working here in Houston because the water is absolutely disgusting and I'm not sure anything could get rid of all the crud in it, but maybe they help in places where the water has less baggage.

We lived in Colorado when I was a kid, where you don't need water filters except occasionally in the summer when in got extra hot (in my neighborhood, there were always a few days in August when the water inexplicably tasted like soap). The Iowa water I drank in college was OK, at least until we tested it in chem lab and realized it was full of sodium. *Full* of sodium. I think those filter things work by ion exchange so afterwards, there was probably even more sodium than there had been before.

Like I said, I drink cheap machine water. I was really thirsty today and a glass of it tasted just like [clean] melted snow. Mm-mm good.