The whole pronouns-must-agree-with-antecedents thing causes me utter agony. Do you know how many paragraphs I’ve had to tear down and rebuild because you can’t say, “Somebody left their cheese in the fridge”, so you say, “Somebody left his/her cheese in the fridge”, but then you need to refer to his/her cheese several times thereafter and your writing ends up looking like an explosion in a pedants’ factory?
In 1890, a report in the Rocky Mountain News recommends hi, hes, hem, as a paradigm that will be “readily taken up and assimilated spontaneously,” though of course that didn’t happen, and so, after more than thirty years of proposals for hi, ir, hizer, ons, e, and ith, no word took hold, in 1894 the paper called on the state legislature to create a gender-neutral pronoun to “correct a well known imperfection of our language.” And shortly thereafter, a reader suggests a “bi-personal pronoun,” either the coordinates he or she, his or her, him or her, or the compounds hesher, hiser, himer: “It was particularly appropriate that Colorado should do so, because the ladies are on a political equality with men.”
And in 1897 a Charleston, South Carolina, newspaper reports on a Massachusetts law that forbids certain kinds of feathers to be worn in hats, a law presumably aimed at women but which employs a masculine pronoun. This presents a problem for the Boston police commissioner, who insists that the masculine pronoun does not include the feminine: “I don’t believe I could arrest a woman on that law,” he said. “The masculine pronoun does not specifically include the women. The law including both usually says ‘person’ or ‘persons,’ but this one simply says ‘his.’”
Cosmetic surgery, especially breast enlargement, is widespread in image-conscious Venezuela, whose beauty queens have won numerous international pageant titles.
Even a recession has not diminished Venezuelans' appetite for cosmetic surgery with many people taking out loans for the surgery.
Mr Rojas, of the opposition First Justice party, told El Universal newspaper that he was not too worried about the medical details of his offer.
"The raffle is a financing mechanism, nothing else," he told the newspaper. "It's the doctor who will do the operation, not me."
"My problem solving skills in StarCraft are the same problem solving skills learned in school or the real world," declares Nate Poling, Ph.D. candidate at the University of Florida and the instructor behind EME2040: 21st Century Skills in StarCraft.[...]
"In StarCraft you're managing a lot of different units and groups of different capacities," says Poling. "It's not a stretch to think of that in the business world or in the work of a healthcare administrator."
Poling points out that people who manage hospitals, factories, small businesses and, say, nuclear power plants all have to manage people who have different abilities, and that they might have learned a thing or two about this process from StarCraft, which demands the same kind of resource and unit management.
"I don't know, it just feels cooler," says Hu, perched on a park bench on a sultry weekday morning, the temperatures already into the 90s, the humidity soaring. "Look, you just shake your shirt to create a breeze. I don't see anyone laughing at me."
In the sports attire section of a nearby department store, Qi Tong scoffs at such reasoning.
"It lowers Beijing's standing as an international city," the 21-year-old says. "I go without a shirt sometimes at home, but never in public. If my dad reaches for his shirt when I'm out with him, I threaten to go home. It's just too embarrassing."
"It's not like they took the prison and tried to like spice it up and turn it into a luxury resort," Price explains — it really looks like a prison.
The hotel boasts that 150 people were shot there. "Ever since the first years of its existence it has been a place to break people's lives and suppress their free will," the hotel's website explains.
"Guests" of the prison sleep on iron beds or prison bunks. For an extra-special occasion, you can arrange to be abducted at your workplace and delivered to the hotel.
"Someone needs to figure out a way to fry beer," he thought.
Zable started experimenting. But the beer-and-dough concoction kept exploding once it hit the fryer. He kept getting burned.
So he consulted with a food scientist – still, no luck.
Then, earlier this year, he finally found the recipe for success. Now Zable keeps the process shrouded in secrecy and has applied for a Fried Beer patent and trademark.
In the current study, scientists examined the "pollen and spores" of fossil plants in the layers of mud that infilled the crater. They found that immediately after the impact, ferns quickly colonised the devastated landscape.
Ferns have an amazing ability to bounce back after catastrophe. Layers full of fern spores - dubbed "fern spikes" - are considered to be a good "markers" of past impact events.
However, there was an unexpected discovery in store for the scientists.
They located a second "fern spike" in a layer one metre above the first, suggesting another later impact event.
