Newsgroups: alt.religion.kibology,alt.fashion Path: news.cinenet.net!news.ececs.uc.edu!nntp.newmedia.no!news.powertech.no!uninett.no!news-feed.inet.tele.dk!bofh.vszbr.cz!dispose.news.demon.net!demon!rill.news.pipex.net!pipex!ams.news.uu.net!uunet!in1.uu.net!world!kibo From: kibo@world.std.com (James "Kibo" Parry) Subject: Dryer Lint: 1999! Battlestar-Galactica-Date: 6549 centons, 81 microns, 0.01 abians Sender: news@world.std.com (Mr Usenet Himself) Message-ID: X-Face: 8"g"L\_0@_U(>UXK.Z1O&I/2Z"{u:Z$yd/};V7:nDV/M9[vY5}WEW|9~k.,.1@Dt Date: Mon, 4 Jan 1999 08:19:25 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: ppp0a005.std.com Organization: Stately Kibo Manor X-Newsreader: Archimedes Plutonium's Electric Velcro Lines: 81 Xref: news.cinenet.net alt.religion.kibology:85862 alt.fashion:257310 X-Cache: nntpcache 1.0.6 (see ftp://suburbia.net/pub/nntpcache) A couple months ago, I wrote: > > WHAT YOUR DRYER LINT SAYS ABOUT *Y*O*U*!*!*!* > > Bluish lint: You like blue clothes. Blue is the power color in your fashion > palette. Blue is one of your five favorite colors! > > Pinkish lint: You like red clothes. Red is the boss of your fashion > palette. Red is one of your three favorite colors! > > Grayish lint: You wash your underwear separately from your colored clothes, > and not often enough either. Okay, I now have a true story which is even more ribaldly wacky than that. I was doing my laundry today. Wait, that's not the part where you're supposed to point and laugh! Waah! Anyway, to fully appreciate this story, you have to understand that I live in a conapt* building where the floors are painted alternating colors to remind you that every once in a while one of the three elevators will let you out a floor too early or late. I live on an odd-numbered floor. Odd floors have puce doors and trim and carpet, with beige-flecked walls. (Puce is the technical term for a color which is to pink as brown mustard is to yellow. It's like pink plus gray plus vomit. It's about the color of a dead mouse's tail, and NOBODY LIKES PUCE, not even fashion designers.) Even-numbered floors have avocado doors and trim and carpet with very light green walls, the special shade which makes you think you've suffered a stroke because the whole world is tinted slightly greenish, the shade of pale green they used whenever they needed to make anything look silver on black and white film. Now, the basement counts as an even-numbered floor because it's floor -1 which is adjacent to floor 1 (because there is no year zero) so it has to have the opposite polarity to floor 1, hence, green, the evil even color and not puce, the evil odd color it deserves. The building's large and luxurious laundromat is in the basement, which means that to get to it I have to walk through a corridor whose shiny walls reflect a radioactive green glow on everything and scare the daylights out of me. I need to wear more sunglasses. So, the laundry room's interior features a table for sorting your socks, and this table, for reasons unknown to me, is the odd-floor shade of puce. (Apparently you can get furniture in this color even though everyone hates this color with a passion. It's the color of a Strawberry Pop Tart and a bowl of oatmeal that have been throw up together.) I was loading my damp clothes into the dryer (duh) and as I tried to clean the lint screen, it wasn't there. It took me a little while to find it... ...it was covered with a thick layer of puce lint and was sitting on the puce table. I could sort of make out its edges. So, I ask you this: (a) What sort of person has PUCE LINT? (b) What sort of person says "Wow, my clothes made lint exactly the same color as that ugly-ass table, I'm going to leave the lint screen on the table and not in the dryer across the room so that people can marvel at how much work I put into manufacturing this lint which exactly matches the puce table!"? (c) WHY PUCE? (d) And is the word "puce" just a remnant of the days when the Anglo-Saxons didn't have separate letters for "c" and "k"? -- K. I even took a photo of the puce lint on the puce table to prove I'm not crazy because you know nobody would retouch a photo of dryer lint, and nobody would photograph lint unless they were me. * Phil Dick used the word "conapt" at least twice a page. Apparently he thought "condo" and "apartment" were too meaningful to be allowed to be adjacent so he shoved them into Lewis Carroll's folding valise and then stood in the Letter People's Squoosh Box.