The oddest thing happened while I was in NY. The Times reported that some rabbanim paskened that the water in Brooklyn could not be drunk unfiltered. Ordinarily, I'd have just chalked this up to the recent outbreak of rabbinical insanity that has managed to find problems with cows (the sebu business), eggs (longhorn chickens; you don't want to know), hair (you already know) and now water. But only a few months ago -- Purim to be exact -- I myself wrote and plastered on the walls of Meah She'arim (actually I paid someone to do the plastering) a pashkevil forbidding water. (The fonts on the online version are not quite as authentic as in the original.) I thought I was joking but apparently I was in the vanguard.
What amuses about all this is that a good number of people imagine that by making yiddishkeit look absurd, and thus serving notice that we march to a different drummer, they are forging a link with their zeides and bubbes from the alte heim. But in fact they achieve the exact opposite: they prove that they suffer from boredom. And boredom was one luxury our zeides and bubbes could never afford. They didn't have the time, the energy or the money for it.