Here’s something for all you manhole cover lovers (and I know you’re out there, because if you can think of it, it’s out there somewhere):
That’s from this vast collection of Japanese manhole covers.
I love the idea of making even such a mundane thing as a manhole cover an object of beauty. The Berkeley City Council never cared much about the appearance of their manhole covers; instead what they did was argue over the appearance of language (what the manhole covers should be called). The arguments went on and on, and finally they began to realize that “personhole cover” had an even dirtier sound to it:
“[Personhole] is not an acceptable de-sexed word.”
–Shirley Dean, councilperson from the Berkeley, (California) City Council, explaining why the Council changed the wording in a sewer equipment request back to manhole cover
I prefer the way the Japanese deal with appearances.
Comments
2 responses to “Appearance of access”
I don’t know…Personhole cover sounds like a headstone or crypt seal in a PC industrial death camp to me. Or maybe I’m thinking peopleholes…
I’ll call it a manhole cover unless there’s a woman in it, in which case I’ll call it a womanhole cover. (Hmmm…. Something suggestive about that….) Anyway!…. That is beautiful. I have long admired the Japanese for their sense of beauty, a sense of beauty which we in the West once possessed in abundance as well before the Utilitarians took over, as, e.g., in the way the knights of the Crusades decorated their horses.. G. K. Chesterton once wrote an essay on why we should beautify door-knockers, and this looks like an instance of the same thing.