Pink Shins

James Mercer is by far my favorite lyricist......just beautiful.


Pink Bullets

I was just bony hands as cold as a winter pole
You held a warm stone out new flowing blood to hold
Oh what a contrast you were
To the brutes in the halls
My timid young fingers held a decent animal.

Over the ramparts you tossed
The scent of your skin and some foreign flowers
Tied to a brick
Sweet as a song
The years have been short but the days were long.

Cool of a temperate breeze from dark skies to wet grass
We fell in a field it seems now a thousand summers passed
When our kite lines first crossed
We tied them into knots
And to finally fly apart
We had to cut them off.

Since then it's been a book you read in reverse
So you understand less as the pages turn
Or a movie so crass
And awkardly cast
That even I could be the star.

I don't look back as much as a rule
And all this way before murder was cool
But your memory is here and I'd like it to stay
Warm light on a winter day.

Over the ramparts you tossed
The scent of your skin and some foreign flowers
Tied to a brick
Sweet as a song
The years have been short but the days go slowly by
Two loose kites falling from the sky
Drawn to the ground and an end to flight.

~The Shins (J Mercer)

Pink Tornado

So....after posting a smattering of random topics or pictorials that share the commonality of the colour pink, it's time to come clean.

To do this, I have to gaze back into my earliest years (cue the hazy fog).

Obviously, growing up as a girl, 'pink' was saturated into my wardrobe, toys, room decor, birthday cards and decorations, hair accessories, and not surprisingly...that of the majority of my same sex playmates.

We did not choose it. It seemed, in fact, to have chosen us. I did not pay it much mind, and because of that, I never questioned it.

That is, until the birth of my younger sister. She was born less than a week before my sixth birthday...completely eclipsing the event in every way. I was thrilled. I thought she was an early gift for me...a living doll. Unlike the small army of dolls I had who each could perform some task: one that cried, one that walked, one that wet it's diapers...this one would do it all!

Of course, her nursery was pink.

That was where the similarities ended. Where I was fair haired, pale with blue eyes....she was dark of hair with a warm french Canadian complexion and huge brown eyes. I was quiet and reserved....shy and obedient. She was curious and willful...outspoken and strong.

As a toddler, she either rejected my feminine hand me down apparel or my parents realized that blush coloured dresses and ribbons were not conducive to playing with trucks in the dirt. She did not play Barbies with me nor fall into the familiar category of younger siblings who took them and snipped off their hair or drew on their faces with marker. She paid them no mind. Instead she turned her attention on the neighbor's child for a near scalping that even though forced to apologize for....still looked most proud of her work.

Over time I began to observe her from a safe distance. We shared vaguely similar features from our same parents. Same household.

We were both girls.

That was when it hit me. She was no less feminine in her overalls and tangled wavy curls than I was in my fushcia sweater and hair ribbon. She did not seem at all masculine sitting among the little boys in the sandbox. Her movements, the way in which she approached play, her diminutive fingers and turn of her wrist even entrenched in dirt pushing the same toy bulldozers through the silt was definitively that of a girl.

It was then that 'pink' began to bother me.

I looked around my room. It was as if someone had coated it in a healthy dose of pepto bismol. It felt suddenly suffocating. As far back as I could remember it was the colour of my life. Many good memories attached to it, I could not easily reject it....but I tried.

Every year, with our birthdays so close together and family Christmas celebrations we shared in simultaneously opening presents. Ones that brought us, as sisters, neigh identical gifts save the age difference. It may have been the same ritual from the beginning, but suddenly I was aware that my sister's gifts of clothing arrived in soft blues, whites and greens.....mine...in pink.

Not wanting to be ungrateful, I began to devise a plan to rid myself of this rosy identity. I would begin months before any gift bearing with specific requests for items in any and every colour but pink. To no avail.

When I was thirteen, I took my first part time job after school and on weekends at an ice cream parlour famous for it's 31wonderful flavours. Of course....the uniform was pink. I sucked it up for my $3.15 per hour because I knew that every two weeks, liberation would come in the form of a cheque. A cheque I cashed and promptly spent on clothing. Mostly black.

Black became my new armour. It seemed to be the antithesis of pink. Nothing girly or frivolous about it. My parents had a mild reaction to it, thinking it a bit "harsh"...but I continued to swath myself in it. There are those who regard fashion as superficial. there is, of course an element of that to it. However, since most of us do not live in nudist colonies...it is our "outward show", our calling card, a presentation and representation of our tastes and personalities. It is also a benchmark moment in our lives when we not only begin to reject what our parents dress us in, but adopt our own identity and make conscious choices about how we will be seen to the rest of the world. Where we decide who we are, how we want to be perceived and where we shake off blindly accepting what others believe we are or want us to be. Our choice.

Mine was black. I can honestly say there was a palpable difference in how people related to me dressed in dark colours. I was taken more seriously on some level. It is difficult to describe unless you have experienced it firsthand.

Yet, every Christmas, my sister and I would unwrap our Christmas eve 'gift' ( a pair of pajamas each that we were told to promptly put on and go to bed)...mine...always pink. As we got older, my sister actually began to find it amusing and would laugh and taunt me a bit with it. One year in my early teens, I asked my relatives at our hosted holiday feast what I thought at the time was a most Barbara Walters-esque question "If I was a colour....what colour would I be?"...hoping to find that general perception would deem me something more neutral. I was gutted. My Mother, Aunt, Sister, Uncle....all of them said "pink". Traitors. Even my black wardrobe had betrayed me. Only my Father answered "Brown"...which to this day I still am slightly unsure of it's meaning as both an offering to appease and represent me, in general.

I began to think my 'pink' curse was following me through life. Like a very pretty, but deadly pink tornado.

So....I ignored it.

Through my late teens and twenties I avoided it. Never purchased anything tinted with it. Almost as in a class war, I turned my nose up at it and paid it no regard. I understood it was all around me...I just regarded it as beneath me.

In recent years, an odd thing happened. Pink began to reveal itself to me through photography, art, fashion, decor in odd and surprising ways. When I began to 'see' it once again, instead of looking past it...it actually appealed to me. It was comforting. There is an actual psychology associated with the colour as it has shown to have a calming affect...tranquilizing.

So...I have slowly adopted it. It no longer offends or defines me. It still feels quite blatantly feminine, but I have realized that so do I. It is a 'part' of who I am...not all of who I am.

In the end...it is just a colour. One of many.

I cannot pretend that as such, it has not been a very large metaphor in my life. No one can deny it has certain and specific immediate connotations in general perception. It does.

For me....it represents a full circle journey on the path to figuring out who I am on the inside...regardless of anything else. Rejecting social norms, then accepting them and making them your own after much life experience.

Pink.

Pink Sole

Pink Monroe

Barbie Pink

Her signature colour is pink.

Ruth Handler watched her daughter Barbara at play with paper dolls, and noticed that she often enjoyed giving them adult roles. At the time, most children's toy dolls were representations of infants. Realizing that there could be a gap in the market, Handler suggested the idea of an adult-bodied doll to her husband Elliot, a co-founder of the Mattel toy company. He was unenthusiastic about the idea, as were Mattel's directors.

During a trip to Europe in 1956 with her children Barbara and Kenneth, Ruth Handler came across German toy doll called Bild Lilli. The adult-figured doll was exactly what Handler had in mind, so she purchased three of them. She gave one to her daughter and took the others back to Mattel. The Lilli doll was based on a popular character appearing in a comic strip drawn by Reinhard Beuthin for the newspaper Die Bild-Zeitung. Lilli was a working girl who knew what she wanted and was not above using men to get it. The Lilli doll was first sold in Germany in 1955, and although it was initially sold to adults, it became popular with children who enjoyed dressing her up in outfits that were available separately.

Upon her return to the United States, Handler reworked the design of the doll (with help from engineer Jack Ryan) and the doll was given a new name, Barbie, after Handler's daughter Barbara. The doll made its debut at the American International Toy Fair in New York on March 9, 1959. This date is also used as Barbie's official birthday.

Mattel acquired the rights to the Bild Lilli doll in 1964 and production of Lilli was stopped. The first Barbie doll wore a black and white zebra striped swimsuit and signature topknot ponytail, and was available as either a blonde or brunette. The doll was marketed as a "Teen-age Fashion Model," with her clothes created by Mattel fashion designer Charlotte Johnson. The first Barbie dolls were manufactured in Japan, with their clothes hand-stitched by Japanese homeworkers. Around 350,000 Barbie dolls were sold during the first year of production.

Ruth Handler believed that it was important for Barbie to have an adult appearance, and early market research showed that some parents were unhappy about the doll's chest, which had distinct breasts. Barbie's appearance has been changed many times, most notably in 1971 when the doll's eyes were adjusted to look forwards rather than having the demure sideways glance of the original model.

Barbie was one of the first toys to have a marketing strategy based extensively on television advertising, which has been copied widely by other toys. It is estimated that over a billion Barbie dolls have been sold worldwide in over 150 countries, with Mattel claiming that three Barbie dolls are sold every second.

Barbie has become a cultural icon and has been given honors that are rare in the toy world. In 1974 a section of Times Square in New York City was renamed Barbie Boulevard for a week, In 1985 the artist Andy Warhol created a painting of Barbie.

Barbie's full name is Barbara Millicent Roberts. In a series of novels published by Random House in the 1960s, her parents' names are given as George and Margaret Roberts from the fictional town of Willows, Wisconsin.

In the Random House novels, Barbie attended Willows High School, while in in the Generation Girl books published by Golden Books in 1999 she attended the fictional Manhattan International High School in New York City (based on the real-life Stuyvesant High School). She has an on-off romantic relationship with her boyfriend Ken (Ken Carson), who first appeared in 1961. A news release from Mattel in February 2004 announced that Barbie and Ken had decided to split up, but in February 2006 they were back together again.

Barbie has had over forty pets including cats and dogs, horses, a panda, a lion cub, and a zebra. She has owned a wide range of vehicles, including pink Corvette convertibles, trailers and jeeps. She also holds a pilot's license, and operates commercial airliners in addition to serving as a flight attendant. Barbie's careers are designed to show that women can take on a variety of roles in life, and the doll has been sold with a wide range of titles including Miss Astronaut Barbie (1965), Doctor Barbie (1988) and Nascar Barbie (1998).

Think Pink

Pink Sky

Pink skys exist because of dust, water, pollution, or other things in the atmosphere that scatter red light. The pollution in the atmosphere, much of which is iron and other industrial byproducts can present shades of red when the sunlight passes through the atoms of the pollutants in the atmoshpere due to the fact that every element's atoms emit a different wavelength of visible light when its electrons are struck by energy(sunlight) as they return to ground state. The reason the skies have very warm colors during sunset and sunrise(appropriate angles for sunlight to reflect the pollution in the atmosphere) in Hawaii and the surrounding region is due to the massive pollution amounts wafting over from China.

"Red Sky at Night...Sailor's delight

Red Sky in the morning...Sailor Take Warning"

This is an old maritime way of gauging the weather. The saying is quite likely to have been passed on by word of mouth for some time before it was ever written down. There is a written version in Matthew XVI in the Wyclif Bible, from as early as 1395:

"The eeuenynge maad, ye seien, It shal be cleer, for the heuene is lijk to reed; and the morwe, To day tempest, for heuen shyneth heuy, or sorwful."

Sunlight is broken into the familiar rainbow spectrum of varying-wavelength colours as it passes through the atmosphere.- The blue/violet end of the spectrum is diverted more than the red/orange.(This is the same mechanism that causes us to see the sky as blue incidentally, but that's getting rather off our point) - When the sun is low in the sky, at dawn and dusk, sunlight travels through more atmosphere than at other times of day. The red wavelength is better able to go on a direct course and be reflected back off clouds, whereas the blue light is more scattered before reaching the cloud and is therefore less visible. So, we see the clouds as red as the light that is reaching them is primarily red.

Pink Pepto

Pepto Bismol is a distinctive pink hue so recognizable it is referred to as "Pepto Bismol Pink". The colour is a result of the main ingredient, bismuth subsalicylate, AKA pink bismuth.

This is the same ingredient that turns your tongue black. Pink bismuth reacts with the tiny amounts of sulfur in your saliva and forms bismuth sulfide, which is black, and it can coat your tongue after you take it orally.

In the Pink

In The Pink

So Davies wrote: ' This leaves me in the pink.
' Then scrawled his name: ' Your loving sweetheart Willie '
With crosses for a hug.
He'd had a drink Of rum and tea;
and, though the barn was chilly,
For once his blood ram warm;
he had pay to spend,
Winter was passing; soon the year would mend.

He couldn't sleep that night.
Stiff in the dark
He groaned and thought of Sundays at the farm,
When he'd go out as cheerful as a lark
In his best suit to wander arm-in-arm
With brown-eyed Gwen,
and whisper in her ear
The simple, silly things she liked to hear.
And then he thought: to-morrow night we trudge
Up to the trenches, and my boots are rotten.
Five miles of stodgy clay and freezing sludge,
And everything but wretchedness forgotten.
To-night he's in the pink; but soon he'll die.
And still the war goes on; he don't know why.

~Siegfried Sassoon

Pink Bubblegum

In 1928, bubble gum was invented by a man named Walter E. Diemer. Here's what Walter Diemer, the inventor himself, said about it just a year or two before he died: "It was an accident." "I was doing something else," Mr. Diemer explained, "and ended up with something with bubbles." And history took one giant pop forward.

What Mr. Diemer was supposed to be doing, back in 1928, was working as an accountant for the Fleer Chewing Gum Company in Philadelphia; what he wound up doing in his spare time was playing around with new gum recipes. But this latest brew of Walter Diemer's was -- unexpectedly, crucially -- different. It was less sticky than regular chewing gum. It also stretched more easily. Walter Diemer, 23 years old, saw the bubbles. He saw the possibilities. One day he carried a five-pound glop of the stuff to a grocery store; it sold out in a single afternoon.

Before long, the folks at Fleer were marketing Diemer's creation and Diemer himself was teaching cheeky salesmen to blow bubbles, to demonstrate exactly what made this gum different from all other gums. The only food coloring in the factory was pink. Walter used it. That is why most bubble gum today is pink.

Gilbert Mustin, President of Fleer named the gum Dubble Bubble and it controlled the bubble-gum market unchallenged for years, at least until Bazooka came along to share the wealth. Walter Diemer stayed with Fleer for decades, eventually becoming a senior vice president.

He never received royalties for his invention, his wife told the newspapers, but he didn't seem to mind; knowing what he'd created was reward enough. Sometimes he'd invite a bunch of kids to the house and tell them the story of his wonderful, accidental invention. Then he'd hold bubble-blowing contests for them.