This natural spring water contains zero calories and no artificial flavours. Bottled directly at the source, it is the clear choice for high quality and great taste! *

First a note about the photo, then a big rant. In the background a condo called Juliet is being built on the site of an old Romeo's restaurant. I'm not a fan of these condos, but I do like the name. Now for an unrelated rant. If you don't like rants, you can stop reading and check out the pictures in the archives

The claims about bottled water always seemed a little over the top and the results of a study found that many of the claims were fabrications:

"Some of this marketing is misleading, implying the water comes from pristine sources when it does not. For example, one brand of "spring water" whose label pictured a lake and mountains, actually came from a well in an industrial facility's parking lot, near a hazardous waste dump, and periodically was contaminated with industrial chemicals at levels above FDA standards."

I've never been a fan of rhetoric and marketing speak and I have a habit of analyzing it to try to see through it. Over the last few years while Windows Vista was stuck in development purgatory Microsoft adopted a strange culture where rhetoric is used to spin everything, including failures, into some kind of reluctant success. The most recent example left me shaking my head when I read, "we will continue to invest in the continuous improvement process." That could have been said more clearly and more honestly simply as, "we will continue to improve."

My favourite example was when the much-touted WinFS project was cancelled it was described as "a change to our original delivery strategy" and a "packaging strategy" in a vain effort to avoid saying that the original plan for WinFS was cancelled. In fact, the closest he came to actually saying WinFS was cancelled was to say, "These changes do mean that we are not pursuing a separate delivery of WinFS, including the previously planned Beta 2 release." Then he finished off with, "We will continue working the innovations" Note that "working the innovations" is not a typo on my part.

Based on the huge increases in sales of bottled water, the recent US political debates, and various other abuses of the English langauge I realize that very few people actually look at marketing critically, but for all the marketing people out there: please try to write simply, directly and honestly because other people are copying your bad habits. Don't piss in a cup and tell me it's natural spring water.

• water may not actually be natural or from a spring. heck, it might not even be water.