Want to make clear, see-through ice cubes for, say, cocktails?
According to the Web site howstuffworks.com, you need to use distilled water, which eliminates the minerals. Boil the distilled water to get rid of the air dissolved in the water. Pour the water into an ice tray, but make the cubes small.


Want ice cubes with flowers in them?
The Web site recipezaar.com says: Buy organically grown flowers (pansies, miniature roses, etc.). Fill an ice tray half full with the boiled, distilled water. Put the tray in the freezer until the water has frozen. Remove the tray from the freezer and put one flower in each ice cube cup. Pour in enough distilled water to cover the blossoms.


Want great crushed ice?
You can buy a home ice crusher. Prices range from tens of dollars up to thousands of them. The Web site chow.com offers a video of someone putting ice cubes from a tray into a towel, folding the towel over the cubes to cover them and then beating on them with a wooden spoon.

I'd think a wooden rolling pin would be better. But people on icechewing.iswhaticrave.com say all you need to do is place a few drops of citrus juice — lime, lemon or orange — in the water of each cube in an ice tray. "It makes the best, softest, most refreshing ICE you can imagine," the writer responds.




* In Iraq — where temperatures can sometimes soar above 120 degrees — takfiris, or fanatical Sunni extremists, apparently decreed ice was un-Islamic during the summer of 2007, customers in a suburb of the Shiite town of Topchi told The New York Times. "In Ghazaliya, it is forbidden to sell ice because the takfiris said, 'The Prophet Muhammad had no ice in his time,' " the manager of an ice factory reported.

* Two year ago, a Florida seventh-grader won top prize at her school with a science project that compared the purity of water from fast-food restaurant ice machines to that from the toilets of the same restaurants. The student discovered the water from the toilets was purer than the ice from the machines 70 percent of the time. "All her friends chew on ice, and it drives her crazy," ABC News reported the 12-year-old said.

* Ice covers 10 percent of the land on Earth and 7 percent of its oceans, according to Mariana Gosnell's Ice: The Nature and History of the Uses of an Astonishing Substance. Of course, that amount of ice grows smaller each year, thanks to global warming.

* When The New Mexican's Ben Swan lived in Alaska, he says, he and his friends made cocktails at Portage Glacier, outside Anchorage. "There's nothing better than glacier ice for Scotch on the rocks," he says. "On the other hand, maybe that's why Portage has receded so much."

* Bars in Paris; London; Shanghai, China; St. Petersburg, Russia; Las Vegas, Nev.; Orlando, Fla., Stockholm, Sweden; and several other places have been carved from ice, and customers can sip alcoholic drinks while sitting there.

* Hotels have been constructed of ice in places like Norway, Switzerland, Finland, Romania and Canada. Jukkasjärvi, Sweden, about 125 miles north of the Arctic Circle, also has an ice hotel.

* According to Wikipedia, the Hungarian Parliament building, until recently, was "air conditioned" by ice harvested in the winter from the country's Lake Balaton.

* "I grew up eating the Singaporean national summer dessert, ice kachang, made in the street food stalls," Pichet Ong says in his cookbook, The Sweet Spot: Asian-Inspired Desserts. "Condensed and evaporated milks are drizzled over shaved ice to make a bracingly fresh and cold 'ice cream.' Mali syrup, flavored by jasmine flowers, adds a sweet, flora aroma. This glorious concoction is then topped with a mixture of tropical fruits — like jackfruit and palm seeds — and sweet red and white beans. Perfect."

* In Lebanon, snow cones are served to Maronite Catholic children entering their teen years before being confirmed in the church. Father Francis Ephrem Boustany, a priest in Bkerke, Lebanon, began the practice in the early 1960s.

* In Sicily, folks like their granita — essentially frozen fruit juice or other drinks — so much that during their simmering summers, they pile it inside split yeasted rolls — then eat the concoction for breakfast. Their favorite? An outrageously strong espresso.

* According to the Internet, a fair number of folks who chew on ice are anemic. A Web site says almost 50 percent of pregnant women and around 20 percent of other women don't have enough iron in their blood. However, only 3 percent of men are anemic.

* Those folks addicted to chewing ice have their own Web site, icechewing.iswhaticrave.com, a place that allows its readers to share recipes on making soft ice, discuss why they chew ice and share their ice-chewing stories.