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How to wash yourself with less than 10 litres of water

2007-01-10

Murray Allen is a the founder of the USQ Community Environment Group. He's an environmentalist, an engineering student and a friend of the Sefton/Craig family.

We gave Murray & his bicycle a lift to the wonderful Woodford Festival over the new year, in our environmentally sound vehicle, and he used the bike to visit ever y single amenities block to stick up two A4 pages about how to bathe in less than 10 lites of water.

Yesterday Murray got a call from Channel 9 in Sydney offering to fly him down so he could go on the Today show, today. Apparently somebody saw his posters and decided to make a spectacle of him.

Murray contacted me and asked me if I could get the bucket bathing stuff on the web so he could mention it on the show. Since I happened to have a spare virtual server lying around I registered bucketbathing.com and put Murray's handout on the site.

I recorded the show, in which Murray washes himself with a bucket and a sponge on national TV using our DVD recorder (he uses a sponge to wash himself I used a DVD recored to capture the show) . I had this idea that it would be simple to get the video and stick it up on youtube or something. Instead I encountered the wonderful world of .vob files. I had a MacBook and a dodgy Windows XP computer to hand, so I decided to have a race between them to see which one could get the video encoded first.

While I was doing that, I started writing this. Went to the Today show website and there's the video. You can't see it on a Mac, far as I can tell, and using Firefox on WinXP it tells you to first install IE 6 – only when you click on that link Microsoft tries to get you install IE 7. Whatever.

Anyway, if you have the right operating system and browser you have a 10% chance of seeing Murray!

Here's the video link, I think. You'll either see Murray or this (notice the lower case 'f' in free software):

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I'll work on getting a more inclusive link to the video.