My defense of ROY G BIV is mitigated by the fact that I don't know what color indigo is -- outside of the rainbow context, it seems to be a word for a dark, intense blue -- and I don't see anything between blue and purple when I look at a rainbow.
In your shoes, I would probably have passive-aggressively said "Pink?!?!" to myself, just loudly enough to be overheard.
My wife frequently criticizes me for worrying too much about whether the facts I pass on to my kids are exactly right. And she is right (and thus you should not worry about correcting the mother).
If parents only told their kids things they were 100 percent right about, they would not tell them anything. People jumping in (even nicely and with the best intentions) to correct their misstatements is not going to help. It will all work out in the long run as long as everyone does their best. Parents will try and get it mostly right, and teachers (hopefully) will correct the stuff the parents get wrong.
LB, do you really want someone passive-aggressively correcting you in the checkout line when you--to pick a random example--explain to Sally the origin of broccoli and get is wrong?
Funny, I wouldn't have had the slightest impulse to intervene there. Now, if she'd looked around, seen without taking offense that I was listening, and asked me, maybe. I've sometimes gotten into surprisingly involved conversations in the checkout line. Maybe a sign that our supermarkets aren't very efficient. Are your cashiers obliged to point out the special of the week to every customer? Who thought that was a good idea?
I was convinced for years that only citizens were allowed to know the top-secret Canadian propeller stroke that was so fast I never saw my dad swim.
A lot of adults conspired on that joke.
3: You're never going to drop that one, are you? And yes, I would. Factual error annoys me, and the picture of a kid with her facts straight being 'corrected' by a parent getting them wrong really annoys me.
I'd like to see LB try to explain to Sally why Broccoli is sometimes considered not Kosher.
5: My dad pulled that kind of stuff all the time, and I do too. But it's only fun if you're doing it well enough to get away with it -- when someone calls you on it, you're supposed to lose.
7: Is it the same reason that NYC water is sometimes not kosher? (Bugs in it big enough to see?)
8: Well, it wasn't developed by crossbreeding rabe with cauliflower by the same family that Albert Broccoli, producer of the Bond movies, belongs to. Ideal is never going to let me live that one down. (It wasn't a put on -- I saw it somewhere and sincerely believed it. I'm not all that bright.)
One of the things I loved about Calvin and Hobbes was how his dad, who was a lawyer, could spin the most awesome plausible nonsense. A role model.
As my son explains it to me, its close resemblance to a tree, and hence likelihood of putting you in mind of the tree of life, a reigning metaphor for Torah, is disconcerting and unpleasant, and should--some would say must--be avoided. Doesn't apply to cauliflower because of the color.
Or else he's Calvin's dad in training.
All I can think of while reading this is "A Mighty Wind:"
"Terry and I worship an unconventional deity. The power of another dimension. Now you are not going to read about this dimension in a book or a magazine because it exists nowhere... but in my own mind. Through our ceremonies and rituals we have witnessed the awesome and vibratory power... of color. "
"This is not an occult science. This is not one of those crazy systems of divination and astrology. That stuff's hooey, and you've got to have a screw loose to go in for that sort of thing. Our beliefs are fairly commonplace and simple to understand. Humankind is simply materialized color operating on the 49th vibration. You would make that conclusion walking down the street or going to the store. "
On the subject of brilliantly bulshitting parents, I shall link to one of my first-ever comments at Unfogged, as well as the occasion of my first banning.
Once I was in a museum (can't remember which), looking at some intricate carved minatures in walnut shell-sized wooden cases, and I heard a dad telling his little girl that the miniatures had been carved out of the wooden case, when it said right on the placard that they'd been carved outside it individually and inserted, so I told them. I felt kind of bad about it.
why is everyone jumping on pink? there is no *purple* in a rainbow at all (not physically possible) but pinkish things could be seen....
arg, nm in 16. pink has the same problem.
But, would the correction be correct?
"Since rainbows are composed of a nearly continuous spectrum, different people, most notably across different cultures, identify different numbers of colours in rainbows."
This is another case of the Gay Agenda crushing a treasured part of our heritage. Unsatisfied with the traditional ROY G BIV scheme, homosexual activists "queered" the spectrum itself to include pink.
18: Thats a different problem. You can count the number of bands in a rainbow differently, sure, but you can't see purple (or pink) because they are *not* colors in this sense. That is, you only see monochromatic colors in a rainbow, because of the physics or rainbows.
I'm now wondering what people would consider the most damaging belief of their youth. (Seems related to the other thread on secret/unpopular beliefs.)
Most damaging belief of my youth: this is an easy one. (Well easy to pick out what the belief was, if not so much to put it into words.)
It was approximately, that I was actually better than everyone around me, appearances to the contrary, and that something magical was going to happen in the near future which would restore this natural order of things.
The most damaging belief of my youth would probably also be about my weight. Fascinating variety, I know.
Actually, no, my beliefs about my self-worth in general (I underestimated) were more damaging than my beliefs about my weight.
People do actually see bands in rainbows, and the way the colors are divided up, though somewhat arbitrary, are not completely so.
I was thinking that Catholicism is a useful dumping ground here, but really mine is probably more like Tia's 24/25.
And there must be some reason why the primaries are so vivid to most of us. I had a basement room as a teenager, and I can remember playing with a prism and wondering: So blue! So red! So yellow! So green!
28 -- I have had similar thoughts run through my head while I was riding on my bike and looking up at traffic lights.
(Well not the blue. But the others, yes.)
The lie I will tell each of my children, with great joy.
But so many of us, of everybody believes themself ugly and ridiculous in those years. Does anybody not? I know there are people who seem confident, but do they remember it that way?
28. Wow, that's making me unexpectedly nostaglic. My grandad in the Yukon had a little collection of prisms with which I played for hours as a kid. I visited during the summers, though, so I never thought of the connection between prisms and "we only had two hours of sunlight today."
soubrziquet, I'm not getting you. Do you mean purple as opposed to violet? Isn't yellow non-monochromatic, considered as light? Like, if you put blue and green light together you get yellow?
purple as opposed to violet
The two are quite different, right?
I dunno. Violet is a kind of purple to me. This may be of a parcel with my opinion that geese are just big ducks.
Roses are red
Violets are purple
I'm posting drunk
au style de Becks-Urple.
Christ I've been saving that up for a while, and will never never never get a better set up.
Hm. I usually just think of violet as extremely dark blue.
34: Matt, you are mixing up the properties of additive colors (e.g. the `primary colors' rules we learn as children) and the properties of light. Color is actually pretty complicated (it is a psychovisual effect). This is pretty simple though. Rainbows and prisms occur because light refracts in a frequency dependent way. So in a prism/rainbow, every color we percieve is a `pure' frequency of light (ok, that is a bit simplified, but..). There are other ways to perceive yellow, say, but there is a monochromatic yellow also (hence the sun, roughly). Purple, however, is only possible by mixing reds and blues (there is no purple light).
gah. that was probably too serious :)
No, that was good; it certainly explained what I was talking about above.
Fair enough. Color confuses the hell out of me anyway; I've had the "brown is really orange" thing explained to me before but have never been able to figure how brown gets to be brown when contrast effects aren't in play.
It seems to me that in this picture there is a band that I would describe as purple, but it is late, I am in fact slightly Becks-Urple, and the power of suggestion is probably also at work. Or maybe I'm mixing up purple and violet again. Though violet still looks purple to me.
Roses are red
Violets are violet
This little poem
Isn't a triolet
Hm. For what it's worth, Wikipaedia thinks that violet and indigo are both members of the range of colors which can properly be referred to as "purple".
Yeah -- that is to what I was referring.
It wasn't the Football Fans against Sexual Assault?
They are not in the range of colors which can be referred to as "purple". They are more greenish, sorta chartreuse.
15 - now I'm annoyed I never read your blog when I had the chance.
IIRC the nudity wasn't very titillating.
it still bothers me that there's some little girl out there who thinks pink is part of the rainbow.
What makes you think the little girl believed the line of BS her mother was feeding her? Likely running through her mind:
"OK, Whatever, Mom. I cannot believe you say this crap to me in public.
"Pink. Christ."
A British friend once told me that what he learned in school for the colors of the rainbow was "Richard Of York Gave Battle In Vain". I was briefly ashamed for my country, but I got over it.
28: yeah, this has to do with the biochemistry of the eye, mostly. Or, if you want to look at it that way, the way a nearly continous spectra is projected down to a three dimensional space, at least roughly speaking. You can look up `tristimulus values' and `color matching functions' for way, waaaaaay more on this sort of thing...
49: I was briefly ashamed for my country
Why? It was 550 years ago.
(Haven't read the entire thread)
In the mother's defense, I can imagine a set of circumstances -- instructing a 6-year-old, for example -- such that purple and pink are a close-enough substitute for indigo and violet.
The most damaging belief of my youth
That I could skate through school on natural ability and a good memory instead of putting effort into something and applying myself. It was true, but it sure didn't do me any favors when I arrived at college without a single developed study skill.
53 goes for me, too. I didn't learn how to really work in a library until graduate school.
Though I did use my time in college to read Gravity's Rainbow, twice. Which, with V, is an order of magnitude better than Crying of Lot 49, which I could never quite believe was written by the same guy.
After further reflection, equating indigo and violet with pink and purple is a huge stretch. However, pink and purple are really the only "little kid" colors left, so I think that under the circumstances her mistake may have been intentional. Correcting her would have out of line.
Also, LB, the kid didn't have it right, thinking there are only six colors.
I had PK half-convinced for quite some time that play-doh was made of bad children, and that if he was bad, I'd take him to the play-doh factory and they'd squish him into play-doh.
Also, once while shopping, he was acting up and I said to him, "If you don't start behaving, I'll take you down to the parking garage and lock you in the trunk," and a woman gave me a LOOK and I winked at her and said, "he knows I'm totally joking," and said, "PK, am I really going to lock you in the trunk?" and he laughed and said, "no."
54 -- everybody disses COL49, which is in fact a magnificent book, a little gem.
53 goes for me too, though I continued to slack off in college and later life.
What's wrong with The Crying of Lot 49? I think I remember seeing some Crying hate on AWB's site too. I love that book.
Oh, I see TMK is also defending it. Yeah, it's totally a little gem. And a neat, intricate puzzle, with a lot of perfectly ordered threads of meaning. I could see not wanting all books to be that way, but it's great that Crying exists.
(And yes, I've read GR and V as well, GR is amazingly good as well, still have not quite gotten V. Still I maintain that COL49 is in the same league of best-ever novels as GR.)
BP, I always threatene to make my son into soup. He realized I was kidding about that, but he did say when he was about 20 that as a kid he sometimes had trouble figuring out whether I was joking or not. I tend to agree now that too much irony is not good for a kid.
Yeah, it's funny how kids can know it's not true, but still kinda wonder....
I think it's cool how the thread randomly worked its way back to Pynchon. I'm totally glad I read COL49 before trying any other Pynchon, and would say it's a good book, but that V is still a lot better. GR, when I was about halfway through I thought I was beginning to get a handle on it and it promptly got ten times weirder. Not necessarily a criticism.
Something like Santa Claus, which I went along with long after having my doubts. My son recently confessed he new "the sleeping medicine" was a little sugar in water, but confessed he entertained some doubt about whether there was another, active ingredient. And then, after my wife more or less 'fessed up, he took it and went to sleep.
63 -- I don't think it was quite random. Slol introduced the subject in 54, it seems to me with explicit reference to the thread title.
52 relates to an observation I have been wanting to make: the purplification of pink. There is some sort of linguistic shift going on. When I was a child, pink was definitely red and white blended together. Now I hear people all the time calling things pink that are more like red with some blue in it. Often it doesn't have white at all. I blame the Disney princesses.
65: But it grew naturally out of previous comments that had nothing to do with Pynchon. It wouldn't have seemed unnatural had the post had another title.
I realize that I am challenging you to a quibble-off.
Lot 49 is shorter and less intimidating than the others. I've tried several times to start V.
I realize that I am challenging you to a quibble-off.
No, that's ok, I cede the mantle of Quibbler to you. For now! I'm sure I'll find good stuff to quibble about later on.
still have not quite gotten V
I confess I find this puzzling, that you could like GR but not get V. For starters, there's a reason GR is about the V2. Get it? V2? It's a sequel to V? I'm not sure it makes sense without V.
Now you guys have almost persuaded me (with all this "gem" talk; I'm a sucker for assertive Paterism) that I should read COL49 again.
70 -- I know I know, V is supposed to be easier than GR. But I have not been able to comprehend it.
Before you reread COL49, why not check out Pynchon's short stories? (I'm almost sure you already have based on your handle; but take another look.) There is some stuff in a couple of them that he builds on in COL49.
I should admit here that there are bits near the end of GR that I have yet fully to digest; have read the book at least 5 times and there are still parts that give me a lot of trouble. But with V there are whole large sections where I have no idea what's going on.
48: I don't care if all the entries are about what she had for breakfast; it's Tia.
David, I figured that's what you meant (and of course you're right), but could not resist the opportunity for the cheap shot.
GR should technically be a prequel to V. Or is it? It takes place almost entirely in the 40s, whereas V starts in 56 but repeatedly flashes back to past times. So, sequel or prequel? This may be the dumbest question ever asked about Pynchon.
Everything I say in this comment is to be taken with a grain of salt:
I meant it's morally and philosophically a sequel.
V as I read it is an elaboration of Henry Adams's meanderings in The Education (and yes, TMK, as I remember it there's material on that in Slow Learner; but.)
V is for vis as in force and for Virgin, as in Adams's religious force that inspires. Only V is for the force that displaces the Virgin: the dynamo, as Adams points out, which strives toward nothing, only away from the present. (This meditation clearly belongs in FL's religion thread, but anyway.)
Thus the mysterious V is a feminine creation mingled with the mechanical ambitions of empire, a death-force, unlike the Virgin, that tends not toward unity but toward plurality and finally chaos. V is dispersed throughout space and time.
Slothrop too: but he represents a very different principle. The V2's raining down on London—the one that is aimed toward us, too, as we read the book, containing within it Gottfried, encased in machinery and rubber, blending man and machine just like V—represent the similar principle, destructive of our humanity. But Slothrop is an opposite to V and V2, an intrinsically organic, shambolic person, imbued with a preternatural affinity for life, loose and at ends (related I think to Benny Profane) and in his being dispersed through creation represents a hope that the force of V can be countered, not by the old and discredited Virgin life-force but by the new, affirmative embrace of chaos that Slothrop represents.
In other words, Pynchon was a pot-smokin' hippie who gave up being an engineer for a reason. So what's new?
It was, to the best of my knowledge, a coinage, implying orgasmic excitement over an onomastic possibilty. I've been feeling guilty about that comment ever since I noticed JO start commenting here.
By "JO" do you mean my alter-ego (not talking about My Alter Ego) -- not sure I see the connection -- though I seem to remember once (as JO) posting a comment on Unfogged which assumed your handle was a TRP ref. But I was not part of the referenced John & Belle thread, was I?
Aw, now I'm feeling guilty about confusing you with that guy.
Not at all -- I'm flattered you would have thought me on a high enough level of consciousness to read in full and comment on a Holbo post...
That guy comments here sometimes. He did some excellent trolling about the Eagles once.
Wow, Jonathan Edelstein commented here once.
Wow, slol confused me with Jonathan Edelstein.
Once I was at the zoo with my daughter and a friend, and I said "look at the buffalo!", and some guy standing next to us said, "Actually, they're bison." Neither of us said, "Thanks, ASSHOLE" but we did sing "oh give me a home where the bison roam."
Isn't there an A.A. Milne going-to-the-zoo poem with a line about a "biffalo-buffalo-bison"?
(consults Google) Aha!:
There are lions and roaring tigers, and enormous camels and things
There are biffalo-buffalo-bisons, and a great big bear with wings,
There's a sort of a tiny potamus, and a tiny nosserus too -
But I gave buns to the elephant, when I went down to the Zoo!
From When We Were Very Young. FWIW.
I read the final line as "I gave my buns to the elephant" -- spending too much time at the Mineshaft...
And, nice analysis.
Thanks. Now I have to go re-read COL49 and see if it has anything to do with those ideas.
The amazing thing about the Edelstein comment is less than two years ago, Glenn Reynolds and Roger L. Simon were reachable by reason.
