Something/Someone Old

Well, this isn't exactly something old, but it is something used. I suppose it counts.

Meet my new dining room table, which is somebody else's old dining room table:

At least, it will be if everything goes well this week. The guy selling it to me was going on vacation two days after I saw the table. He didn't want to take a check so I couldn't pay him on the spot. I need to drive down again as soon as he gets back from vacation and hand him cash. If this all goes well, I will save at least $400 and probably over a thousand. New furniture is expensive.

Eating off an actual dining room table made of actual wood will be most welcome. Next challenge: finding a china cabinet with hutch that isn't massively expensive.

Something else old, this time from 1974. I like to keep quotations from this book alive:

This is a book that has grown with me since I first read it as a teenager. When I was a teenager, I read it for the plot. When I became a scholar, I read it for the narrative structure (alternating back and forth between present and past and different planets). When I got older still, I read it for the politics and ethics. It remains as helpful to me at 49 years old as it was when I was 14. Can't say that about every story!

The basic story is that a revolutionary movement, generations ago, had succeeded at their revolution so well that they had the establishment on the ropes. The establishment cut a deal: the revolutionaries could have the Moon for their own. It was a desert world, habitable for homo sapiens, but just barely. In exchange for getting handed the Moon, the revolutionaries had to allow the establishment to continue to take shipments of ore, since the Moon had previously been their mining colony.

Then one day, generations later, a physicist from the revolutionary world decides to go back and break through the cultural segregation of the two societies, sharing his breakthroughs in physics with the establishment in exchange for re-connecting his people to the larger galaxy of inhabited worlds. His experience when re-entering the non-revolutionary world is one of the finest stories I've ever read.

Someone asks him if his home planet is wonderful.

“No. It is not wonderful. It is an ugly world. Not like this one. Anarres is all dusty and dry hills. All meager, all dry. And the people aren’t beautiful. They have big hands and feet, like me and the waiter there. But not big bellies. They get very dirty, and take baths together, nobody here does that. The towns are very small and dull, they are dreary. No palaces. Life is dull, and hard work. You can’t always have what you want, or even what you need, because there isn’t enough. You Urrasti have enough. Enough air, enough rain, grass, oceans, food, music, buildings, factories, machines, books, clothes, history. You are rich, you own. We are poor, we lack. You have, we do not have. Everything is beautiful here. Only not the faces. On Anarres nothing is beautiful, nothing but the faces. The other faces, the men and women. We have nothing but that, nothing but each other. Here you see the jewels, there you see the eyes. And in the eyes you see the splendor, the splendor of the human spirit. Because our men and women are free—possessing nothing, they are free. And you the possessors are possessed. You are all in jail. Each alone, solitary, with a heap of what he owns. You live in prison, die in prison. It is all I can see in your eyes—the wall, the wall!”

― Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

Something New

Meet Colin and Caroline!

This is a relatively new band, at least to me, given that my musical attention went to sleep some time in the mid-90s and has only woken up and looked around to see what's new occasionally over the past twenty years for songs like this:

and this:

and this:

The soundtrack to 13 Reasons Why has introduced me to a lot of excellent new music, including a song by Colin and Caroline. These are two very talented young people. Hope they get mondo success!

Something Borrowed

I'm not going to make the stupid mistake of identifying everybody who speaks Spanish as a native language together, like they don't have separate cultures and histories. But I've gotta point out that it seems like both Spain and Latin America come up pretty damned often when I look into ecological innovations and advancements.

I've got two very cool (and similar) ideas--one from Barcelona, and one from Bogota:

I look at this building and think "all of the buildings in that city should be green like this." This video doesn't have a voiceover; it's just images of the building. Cool facts about the building's carbon mitigation come up on the screen too.

Here is one in Barcelona--the Spanish have been doing some pretty excellent things over the past few decades! This one has a lot more explanation.

Something Blue

This is very cool:

Poland Unveils Glow-In-The-Dark Bicycle Path That Is Charged By The Sun
8 months ago by​ James Gould-Bourn

Cycling is one of the most eco-friendly ways to travel, and thanks to this solar-powered bike lane that glows in the dark, it just got even more so.

The luminous blue cycling strip, which can be found near Lidzbark Warminski in the north of Poland, was created by TPA Instytut Badań Technicznych Sp. z o.o. It’s made from a synthetic material that can give out light for up to ten hours at a time once charged by the sun throughout the day.
http://www.boredpanda.com/glowing-blue-bike-lane-tpa-instytut-badan-tech...

How are y'all today?