Something/Someone Old

This is pretty cool. Take a look at the oldest post office:

The man standing in front of it, Dr. Manzoor Alam, is apparently the man who saved it from closing:

The Birmingham stamp collector and postal historian moved to secure the future of the shop after it was put up for sale. He took up the appointment on July 3 and the post office has undergone a refurbishment before reopening today. Mr Alam, who will run the shop with his wife and daughter, also hopes to open a postal museum in the village in future. He said: “I feel really very pleased, very privileged to have a post office with such a rich heritage.”

Read more at: http://www.scotsman.com/heritage/people-places/sanquhar-world-s-oldest-p...

I've always liked the Post Office. One of the greatest inventions of man, and a clear signpost of human civilization.

Something New

How about window blind solar collectors? These require no professional installation, and are much cheaper than putting collectors on your roof. They look just like normal blinds:

It's not enough to power everything in your home, but:

Each 10-square foot window area covered by the blinds can generate as much 150W of power, which should be enough to power all the lights in your home, as well as three MacBooks all running at the same time.

If it works correctly, sounds like a cool, affordable, money-saving green device. They have a Kickstarter up here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1170840477/solargaps-smart-solar-bl...

Something Borrowed

A loanword is a word that has come into usage in English but originates in another language. Apparently the word "they/their" comes from an Old Norse word "peir."

I find they/their interesting because it's always seemed to me that its usage as a singular pronoun has political implications. English has a problem with its relentlessly gendered pronouns--what to do if you don't know the gender of the person involved? English doesn't like to use "it" for people. So what to do?

That's the challenge Ursula Le Guin faced in her 1969 book The Left Hand of Darkness, in which she writes about a planet where, most of the time, the sentient bipedal population is neither male nor female. They go into heat, like most mammals, a condition they call kemmer, and most of them don't even care which gender they assume during that time. They also don't care at all about sex except during that time. But how was she to refer to them when not doing so by name?

The problem created a multi-decade debate in feminist circles, and rather a headache for LeGuin.

What a very dry, dull matter, of no conceivable importance to anyone but grammarians and pedants! How I wish it were so! But The Left Hand of Darkness is haunted and bedeviled by the gender of its pronouns, a wild, fierce, and intractable tribe.

Having invented a race of people who are essentially sexless except for a few days a month, when they become very highly sexed either as male or female, and for the duration of pregnancy and lactation, when of course they remain female having discovered the Gethenians, what was I to call them? In 1967, when I wrote the book, I called them all "he." I believed then that the masculine pronoun in English was genuinely generic, including both male and female referents. This is a pleasant and convenient belief. Unfortunately, the more you look at it, the less credible it becomes. Even more unfortunately, it has been adopted as one of the Thirty Nine Articles of Antifeminism. Some years after the book was published, I lapsed from the faith, and have remained unregenerate ever since. "He" means what it says, no more, no less alas!

As LeGuin puts it sarcastically in another essay, "Of course, "he" is a generic pronoun, as in "If a person needs an abortion, he must go to another state."

This is a good argument for retrieving "their" as a singular generic pronoun from its status as a colloquialism, where it's resided since a bunch of seventeenth-century pedants decided it was an incorrect usage. Not Latin enough, according to LeGuin:

Historically, and colloquially, they has been regularly used as an ungendered or bisexual singular. "If any student has a problem with this, I want to talk to them after class," we may say, or, "Somebody left, but I didn't see who they were." But somewhere along in the seventeenth century the grammarians got to worrying about agreement of number, probably because they wanted English to be more like Latin, because Latin was supposed to be nobler and more virile than the vulgar tongue; and they decreed that they as a singular pronoun was "incorrect," as it would be in Latin. This has not stopped any of us from using it, ever since, when we speak, but it has stopped most of us from using it when we write.

So hooray for the Old Norse for letting us borrow something so handy.

Something Blue

Well, this is interesting. Apparently an American photographer named Spencer Tunick, famous for shots of groups of naked people, created an art installation called "Sea of Hull" last year. Thousands of people got painted blue for the photo shoot:

The art installation will be exhibited at the UK City of Culture, which is going on, well, right now! Last week, there was an article on Tunick's installation:

In July 2016 people travelled far and wide to participate in Spencer Tunick’s Sea of Hull, a series of unique artworks commissioned by the Ferens Art Gallery. Under the artist’s direction, over 3,200 participants stripped off and painted their skin with one of four shades of blue body paint; each hue of colour inspired by the city’s sea faring heritage and its impressive maritime art collections.

In the early hours of the morning thousands of bare bodies lined the streets of Hull, juxtaposing the human form against public space. New textures and shapes emerged within Hull’s urban landscape like never before and the contours of bodies metamorphized into ripples of the sea.

Here's a link if you want to read the rest of the article. https://www.hull2017.co.uk/discover/article/spotlight-spencer-tunicks-se...

Pretty cool, though I can't tell whether I think the effect is neat or creepy, at least in the photo where they're all lying down.

How are y'all doing today?