bathing beauties or adult-swim

From around the mid-eighteenth century through the Victoria Era, females wanting to take the sea air and enjoy a day at the beach were wheeled out past the maddening crowd of potentially gawking and leering males in personal stage-coaches, as Presurfer informs.
Etiquette and modesty (though these rules were recent impositions and far different from the practise of mixed skinny-dipping) dictated dictated that women bathers would enter a mobile changing booth, “bathing machines,” in formal street garb and disrobe, doffing her dress in for an equally concealing swim-suit and in the shallows, be allowed to frolic on a tether or at the strong hand of attendant. After this experience, the swimmer would be escorted back, drying off and donning her street clothes again for the sake of decorum. Maybe this production is less showy and less inclusive than a burkini.

lingua franca or brexit, stage left

To the disdain of the Maltese and Irish—whose concerns are being downplayed as they elected to make their first official languages Maltese and Gaelic, respectively, some in Brussels want to see the use of the English language in official parlance scaled back. Although there’s no legal status accorded to the “working languages” of the European Union and French and German are only spoken by tradition, some feel that the UK should take its linguistic and cultural dominance with it. What do you think of this proposal? I am already a little fearful that a large percentage of the world might forget about Europe as some byzantine amalgam that’s just alien and just the end of some long, strange continuum of foreignness without the Anglo-Saxon element.

gort-appointed attorney

Though I’ve always dreaded the day when torrents of tut-tutting virtual attorneys scour the internet like ambulance-chasers seeking out and perhaps even provoking legal contests, as yet another presence that is liable to force people from the web, I do tip my hat to the young individual who has created a rather Turing complete electronic barrister that has, pro bono, appealed nearly of a quarter of a million parking-violations, winning far more than half and getting human (and perhaps robotic ones too) drivers out of four million dollars in fines in New York and London. I suspect, however, the metropolises might turn litigious in kind.

books—check ‘em out!

The Vault’s Rebecca Onion has a nice appreciation of the Mid-Century Modern posters of Mary Joan Egan and Cynthia Amrice, commissioned as part of the US Congress’ Library Services and Construction Act of 1962 that sought to provide federal assistance to public libraries in order to expand their services—especially in blighted and rural areas. Sadly, due to shrinking budgets, the initiatives have been all but discontinued since the mid nineteen-nineties, but this gallery is a nice reminder of what libraries were (and are) capable of and, beyond their educational value, makes one appreciate how technologically astute these neighbourhood institutions could be with micro-film readers, photo-copiers, typewriters and film projectors and reach back to a time when office equipment seemed more magical and curious.