by 29cm

The sunset was magnificent with the intensity and brilliance that can be found only in the tropics. . . . It was a sensual isle, a Biblical land of ruby wines and golden sands and indigo trees. The men stared and stared. The island hovered before them like an Oriental monarch’s conception of heaven, and they responded to it with an acute and terrible longing. It was a vision of all the beauty for which they had ever yearned, all the ecstasy they had ever sought. . . . It could not last. Slowly, inevitably, the beach began to dissolve in the encompassing night. The golden sands grew faint, became gray- green, and darkened. The island sank into the water, and the tide of night washed over the rose and lavender hills. After a little while, there was only the gray- black ocean, the darkened sky, and the evil churning of the gray- white wake. Bits of phosphorescence swirled in the foam. The black dead ocean looked like a mirror of the the night; it was cold, implicit with dread and death. The men felt it absorb them in a silent pervasive terror. They turned back to their cots, settled down for the night, and shuddered for a long while in their blankets.
—Norman Mailer, The Naked and the Dead, 1948.

• "I ain't got a man."  According to the ridiculous standards that PInKSLiP actively fights, only a woman (of any orientation) could sing such a line.
• "I ain't got a son."  This line could presumably be sung only by a singer with no male heir.
• "I ain't got a daughter."  This line is presumably exclusive to daughterless singers.
• "I ain't got no one."  Who but the impotent, the deliberately childless, the unmarried, the asexual, or the socially inept would dare to sing such a line?
• "I'm a lonely girl."  Grown-up girls would likely need to change the word to "woman," and male singers would need to switch the gender, according to today's ridiculous standards.
• "I ain't got a mother."  Only orphans need bother retaining this lyric, apparently.
• "I ain't got a father."  This would be exclusive to genetically engineered ("test tube") people.
• "I ain't got a sister."  This line is for singletons, apparently.
• "Not even a brother."  Ditto.
• "I'm a lonely frog."  Human singers need not bother.
• "I ain't got a home."  A line for homeless singers, obviously.

by Phil BF

Among colours, such as are soft and cheerful (except, perhaps, a strong red which is cheerful) are unfit to produce grand images. An immense mountain, covered with a shining green turf, is nothing, in this respect, to one dark and gloomy; the cloudy sky is more grand than the blue, and night more sublime and solemn than day. Therefore in historical painting, a gay or gaudy drapery can never have a happy effect: and in buildings, when the highest degree of the sublime is intended, the materials and ornaments ought neither to be white, nor green, nor yellow, nor blue, nor of a pale red, nor violet, nor spotted, but of sad and fuscous colours, as black, or brown, or deep purple, and the like.
—Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1806; as quoted by Marjorie Hope Nicolson in Newton Demands the Muse, 1946.