These delightful "Characters for an Epic Tale" were created by Tom Gauld for Cabanon Press.  The piece is available as a postcard within Tom's book Robots, Monsters, Etc.

I opened my eyes — and all the sea was ice- nine. The moist green earth was a blue- white pearl. The sky darkened. Borasisi, the sun, became a sickly yellow ball, tiny and cruel. The sky was filled with worms. The worms were tornadoes.
—Kurt Vonnegut Cat’s Cradle, 1963.

by Dimrill

Heavy and Weightless Colors

To paraphrase a classic riddle, which weighs more: a pound of yellow feathers or a pound of red lead? Color may be a weighty subject, but the spectrum can't be gauged in terms of tonnage. The Swiss painter Paul Klee observed that color can be "neither weighed nor measured. Neither with scales nor with ruler can any difference be detected between two surfaces, one a pure yellow and the other a pure red, of similar area and similar brilliance. And yet, an essential difference remains, which we, in words, label yellow and red" (On Modern Art, 1948). Klee was right—even though colors don't technically have weight, they can appear quite heavy and substantial or extraordinarily light and vaporous.

[Read the entire article in my guest blog at ColourLovers.com.]

Piecing together the secret of perfection . . .


 

It was the night of the full moon. Flaring like a white- hot coin, so brilliant that it hurt one’s eyes, the moon swam rapidly upwards in a sky of smoky blue, across which drifted a few wisps of yellowish cloud. The stars were all invisible. The croton bushes, by day hideous things like jaundiced laurels, were changed by the moon into jagged black- and- white designs like fantastic woodcuts. . . .

‘Look at the moon, just look at it!’ Flory said. ‘It’s like a white sun. It’s brighter than an English winter day.’

Elizabeth looked up into the branches of the frangipani tree, which the moon seemed to have changed into rods of silver. The light lay thick, as though palpable, on everything, crusting the earth and the rough bark of trees like some dazzling salt, and every leaf seemed to bear a freight of solid light, like snow. Even Elizabeth, indifferent to such things, was astonished.
—George Orwell, Burmese Days, 1934.

"First came the buzzing, and then the Hive mind came online." --Neal L. Asher, The Skinner

"It is as if she had shredded time into gossamer threads and rewoven them into a pattern of her own."
—Orville Prescott, In My Opinion

Q: Where's the best effing place to live in Illinois? 

A: Effingham!

"We speak often of rhetorical questions, but never about another figure of speech of equal importance: the rhetorical imperative."
—Geof Huth

Some people say / The Green River Blues ain’t bad, / Then it must not have been / Them Green River Blues I had.
—Charley Patton, "Green River Blues," 1929.

Piecing together the secret of paradise . . .


 

The original American Idol:

Q: "Who wants to play the ghost of Hamlet's father?"
A: "I."

First Person Ominous

---

Q: "Who is impartial?"
A: "I."

First Person Objective

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Q: "Who feels invincible?"
A: "I."

First Person Omnipotent

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Q: "Who can bi-locate?"
A: "I."

First Person Omnipresent

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Q: "Who here can referee?"
A: "I."

First Person Adjudicative

by atomicshark

Multicolored, Multilingual

When we talk of colors, we can't help but be multilingual. Our pictorial world tour of exotic color names continues on through Italy, France, and Greece.

 

by Starfires.

Amethyst. The opposite of "chartreuse" (the name of a pale green liqueur), "amethyst" means "not drunken" in its original Greek. The violet/purple quartz stone was so-named because it was popularly believed to prevent inebriation.

 

by hartlandmartin.

Verdigris. The name of this bright blue-green color is derived from an Old French phrase meaning "green of Greece." It refers to the patina on copper, bronze and brass. In the musical "Wicked," verdigris is the color of the Wicked Witch Elphaba.

 

by modean987.

Vermillion. The name of this bright red pigment is derived from the Latin word for "worm." Vermillion is naturally produced from Chinese cinnabar.

 

by Jesse Gardner.

Cerulean. The name of this deep blue sky color is derived from a Latin word meaning "heavens."

 

by Kelly Sue.

Ecru. The name of this light gray-yellow color comes from a French word meaning "raw, unbleached." Once considered a synonym for beige, ecru is now regarded as a separate color.

 

by key-bee.

Carnelian. This orange-red-brown color is named for the reddish semiprecious mineral chalcedony. The word is derived from a Latin root meaning a flesh-colored horn. The color is famous as the official shade of Campbell's Soup cans.

[Read the entire article in my guest blog at ColourLovers.com.]

From the margins (or margarines, rather) of philosophy:

Piecing together the secret of the one thousand cranes . . .


 

I gave my name, and looked about. Deal table in the middle, plain chairs all around the walls, on one end a large shining map, marked with all the colors of a rainbow. There was a vast amount of red — good to see at any time, because one knows that some real work is done in there, a deuce of a lot of blue, a little green, smears of orange, and, on the East Coast, a purple patch, to show where the jolly pioneers of progress drink the jolly lager- beer. However, I wasn’t going into any of these. I was going into the yellow. Dead in the center. And the river was there — fascinating — deadly — like a snake.
—Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, 1899.