Celebrity Brilliance

In O Magazine Jennifer Aniston is quoted as saying: "I take a three-minute shower. Here's why: I found out that every two minutes in the shower uses as much water as a person in Africa uses for everything in their life for a whole day!" She doesn't say if this is a low-flow shower head or not.

Aren't celebrities cute? This is a woman who is reported to have spent $1 million for a wedding. Her house went up for sale after that four year marriage died. The house that was purchased for $13.5 million two years prior went on the market with a lustrous asking price of $28 million. That includes the pool and the spa.

Ms Aniston is going "green" from her 10,000 square foot house. There is a screening room containing Brazilian mahogany floors and an art studio. Not to mention an outdoor fireplace and an indoor glass-walled pub.

It's hard to figure out how many two-minute showers it would take to fill a full sized swimming pool. Or even a hot tub. That's probably included in the spa. A fairly nice pool might be 60 feet by 30 feet with a sloping bottom. Such a pool contains 87,750 gallons of water – or enough to shower for 35,100 minutes with a low flow shower head since they put out about 2.5 gallons per minute. Ms Aniston could stand in her shower without ever leaving for 585 hours straight before she used as much water as in her pool. And that's without thinking about evaporation from the pool.

Instead of having a pool in the backyard, one could take 11,700 three-minute showers. That's more than 32 years worth of daily showers. The hot tub probably holds less than 1,000 gallons and isn't enough to worry one's pretty little head over. That would just be more than four month's worth of showers anyway.

Celebrities find a cause and then say really stupid things and get quoted in the press like they are some sort of Einstein. Regular people do the same thing. But we don't get quoted in the press and people tell us we are stupid when say incredibly stupid things.

I'm not sure how saving water when you live next to an ocean helps people living in a desert area. It's not like water is a non-renewable resource. Keeping all the water clean would be a great idea. Figuring out how to haul one of the mammoth size-of-a-small-country icebergs that calf off the Antarctica ice shelf to places that could use some fresh water would be wonderful.

Telling me you take a three-minute shower to conserve resources when you have a pool in the back of your 10,000 square foot mansion is – well, it isn't all that green.