Tag Archive for: pool

Shut your mouth and get your Speedos

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From the offbeat water conservation tipline: The Vienna, Austria Council is getting pretty fed up with constantly refilling their swimming pools because people keep swallowing the water while men insist on plunging in and out of the pool in their water-sucking Bermuda shorts! And they’re requesting that it stops. Immediately. Thank you. From Telegraph.co.uk,

Swimmers in Austria told to stop swallowing water: A budget-conscious council in Austria has requested that swimmers stop swallowing water in a bid to save money.

According to a survey carried out by managers at Vienna’s 18 public swimming pools bathers are drinking 5,000 litres of chlorinated pool water a day.

Official Martin Kotinsky said: “A lot of water gets taken out in the material every time a swimmer uses the pool and it has to be replaced.” He pointed out that, as well as replacing water, authorities had to spend £20 on chlorine – £1.11 per pool.

The council is also targeting people who wear Bermuda shorts to go bathing. Tests revealed that the average wearer takes 2.5 litres of water with them trapped in their swimwear every time they get out of the pool.

Mr Kotinsky said: “A lot of water gets taken out in the material every time a swimmer climbs in and out. That means that for every 1,000 visits to the pool we lose 2,500 litres of water.”

Thanks to Julie O’Fee for the tip! Photo: “Speedo Blanco” by Incase on Flickr

Dogs Rule the Pool in Colorado

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Labor Day is the unofficial end of summer in the U.S. so let’s close this one out with a major dose of the cuteness “Awwwwwws!” At Scott Carpenter Pool in Boulder, Colorado the annual Dog Dayz event gives the rules a pause (paws?) to let the canines swim, dive and rule the pool on a select few days at the end of the summer.

It seems the pups really are like people, as you’ll recognize all the familiar people pool personalities in dog form–including show-offs, chickens, the overly-cautious, and quite possibly, pool pee-ers!

Man and Beast are Crazy with Heat

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They say heat can drive man and beast crazy. We’ve got our heat and water worries in this ‘burb, but as of now we don’t have to worry that a steamy hippo might get stuck on our water tower, or that a survivalist pig hops into our pool.

From katv.com, Little Rock, news of a pool party with ham dip! (All actual photos under the close guard of the Associated Press.)

A swimming pig NOT from the Associated Press

An 800-pound hog that survived on its own for a week after a truck flipped while on its way to a slaughterhouse has surfaced in a swimming pool at a home near the crash site.

LeAnn Baldy, whose house is only yards from Interstate 430, said Monday she noticed her pool was suddenly overflowing and then saw the immersed pig, which was having a drink in the pool.

About 90 hogs were in the trailer when it overturned where I-430 meets I-40, and about 60 survived. Officials said they thought the last of them had been caught.

Baldy says she found a farmer to take in the pig. A spokesman for Odom’s Tennessee Pride says it can’t use the hog in its sausage products because no one knows what the hog had been eating in its week on the lam.

You know we watch out for what’s hot and hip. This covers the best of both worlds! From a story and photo gallery on metro.co.uk,  

An overheating hippo was so desperate to cool down that he climbed over the side of a 3m (10ft) water tower for a nice long soak.
However, after happily splashing around for a while, the mammal found it could not get out of the pool and was well and truly stuck.
Luckily, a farm worker noticed water spilling over the side of the concrete container and spotted two enormous nostrils poking out of the tank. He immediately rang for help and, within hours, rescuers arrived at the farm in Alkmaar, just outside Nelspruit in South Africa.

Equipped with a hydraulic crane and a cage, hippo hunter Chris Hobkirk and his team from the Mpumalanga Tourism and Parks Association set to work. In a four-hour operation, they drained the tank and used poles to gently nudge the hippo into the 3m-long (10ft) steel cage before winching it to safety. 

I Hope They’ve Been Chlorinating

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It’s Memorial Day weekend! That means Americans are heading en masse to the pool. Hopefully, many of that masse will take this article from cnn.com to heart, and resist the temptation to keep the party rolling non-stop by peeing in the pool.

Although urine in the water probably will not cause swimmers to go to the emergency room, it causes “more of a respiratory, ocular irritation: the red puffy eyes or a cough, an itchy throat,” said Michele Hlavsa, an epidemiologist in the division of parasitic diseases at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.” A big health message is not to urinate or pee in the water.”

And it happens far more frequently than water-lovers would like to think. In a survey of 1,000 U.S. adults conducted in April and May, 17 percent admitted relieving themselves in a swimming pool. Even the Olympics’ most decorated swimmer, Michael Phelps, confessed to urinating in the water to TV host Jimmy Kimmel in a 2008 interview.

And if that’s not enough to put a damper on this weekend’s pool party fun, the survey

found that 11 percent of the surveyed adults said they have swum with a runny nose, 7 percent with an exposed rash or cut and 1 percent when ill with diarrhea. The margin of error was plus or minus 3.1 percentage points.

Suddenly, a 3.1% margin of error seems HUGE! But never mind, I’m being a party pooper, aren’t I? (pun score!) Dive in anyway, and here’s a soundtrack for some summer fun: “I Peed in the Pool,” a bad-taste parody of Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl.” (You can buy the mp3 here if you’re so inspired!)

Lyrics include: I peed in the pool and I liked it, It saved me a trip to the toilet
I peed in the pool ‘stead of waiting, I hope they’ve been chlorinating