"A front door that opens clockwise into the home channels more energy inside."
Is that simple nonsense? Feng shui? Would that link have led me to builders who would have swapped my opens-outward or anti-clockwise-opening door for a clockwise one? What energy is channeled inside? The world provides us with more puzzles to solve every day than an ordinary householder ever needed to think about in the long-ago.
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crowleycrow- John Crowley
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See: http://blog.classicalfengshui.com/?p=2
Our own pre-clock ancestors used 'widdershins' for what we now call anticlockwise, and it had malicious/unhealthy associations – perhaps because it was the opposite way to the sun's travel, for northern-hemisphere people?
'I'm ready like a Chinaman going in through his front door', the blue-daubed clansfolk used to say to each other before battle.
Most alarming warning:
7. Your front entrance should not face a narrow gap between two buildings. If so, it can potentially cause your savings to be squandered away.
I think that's exactly what happened to me in 2007! I always wondered what happened to my money.
In Double Indemnity Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray)'s door opens clockwise, out into the hallway (to make a bit of very tense business possible). But lockable doors almost always open into the rooms whose access they regulate, so that they can be rammed open from the exterior in an emergency or fire, without their frames' buttressing them. You can lock or unlock them without a key from the inside: but they're designed to yield from the outside if things are desperate enough. And in hallways, you won't slam an opening door into someone hastening down the corridor if it opens inwards.
The door that leads from the back, or kitchen, stairs in my house opens (of course) outward, and has a little window in it, so that someone coming down will see if there is anyone in the kitchen standing in the way.
I had occasion, in an LJ entry not long ago, to transcribe this great and semi-relevant passage about locks, from the Nobel Prize winning economist T.C. Schelling:
ANother kind of NYC lock then had a bar lodged on a metal cup in the floor and thence into a holder in the door, that your key could move aside and allow to slide out of the way. (Like propping a chair against a door, sort of.) This device was called a "police lock>" The druggies of the day claimed it was for keeping ht police out, ha ha.
Edited at 2012-12-27 11:30 pm (UTC)
Growing up, it was driven so forcefully into my mind that ALL THE CULTURES OF THE WORLD perceive left-handedness as a curse -- you know the tedious drill, in India you can only use your left hand to wipe your bum and never to eat, don't you know that the Latin word for "left" is where the word sinister comes from, dextrous means both "talented" and "right [side]", in fact even "right" itself means both "correct" and "right", gauche means both "left" and "clumsy" etc. etc. etc. ETC. ETC. God it is ENDLESS, that it was just so refreshing for me to meet people from a culture who didn't begin with those assumptions.
Though I think folks in our modern culture don't much notice or care about left-handedness any more, much less ascribe moral or supernatural qualities to it, I think there's still this really patronizing assumption that "all the cultures of the world!" think it's a bad thing and that we moderns are super-enlightened for letting left-handed people use pens without accusing them of witchcraft. I was glad to meet people from other cultures where they not only had the opposite view, but weren't so damn self-congratulatory about it.
anyway lefties have a future as well-paid actors -- you have surely noticed how many actors are left-handed.
I also agree that people don't seem to care much anymore, and I think, as a result, that the percent of lefties is definitely increasing. Not only actors, but I see more and more leftie programmers and politicians (at least, Democrats ;-) Maybe one day it will cease to be noted at all.
Nah.