THE LAST COLOR ENTRY

I guess it is appropriate to say my face is Red for not providing more steady and consistent entries. Long senior moment could be the excuse, but I offer none. I am going into another topical seige for viewers; the color stories are dead for the moment. But I did finish the Color book.

I recently purchased a Nikon Coolscan 5000 to recapture quality images from those 3 million 35mm slides that seem to be in everyone's closet or garage. Follow the adventures of how to and how NOT to attack the task. Maybe you will even be encouraged to just chuck your slides in the trash.

Either you, your parents or grandparents took them. Then no one used them for years. The slide projector froze up and nobody could figure out what to do with the slides. When your parents or grandparents died, they usually got pitched because none of the survivors knew what to do with them. Besides, no one was around to figure out, " is this the neighbor that lived next door to us when we lived in the house on Jaworsky Street or is that Grandma's cousin, Betsy, who married that guy that used to put the lampshade on his head after a few drinks?

So, I am doing what my cousin, Sandy, said someone has to do, "to preserve the family history". I will make a career of scanning in the 3 million slides to digitize them onto the computer, then edit using PhotoShop if possible or dumping the useless ones. Yes, I know about saving ALL images and assigning the STAR listings as well as categorizing. Next the images have to be organized into meaningful groups and prepared for entering into Apple's iMovie. This allows creation of a sound track that will let me tell everyone that this is, "Grandma's cousin, Betsy". I can then make a DVD(s) with Ken Burns effects with sound track.

God help me, I actually remember seeing Aunt Betsy's husband with the lampshade on his head, dancing on the table and making a fool of himself at a family picnic on Lake Washington. Even though I was about 9 or 10, I vowed to never take a lampshade away from its precious lampstand; a promise I have kept to this day. Lampshades of the world, you are safe!

THE COLOR RED

Were it not for a friend brain-washing me into reading Victoria Finley’s book, Color, A Natural history of the Palette, I would have overlooked an article in the Los Angeles Times, dated May 26, 2007. Sam Enriquez’s article, “A long-tended dream is open for business” tells about a project started by the women of Oaxaca, pronounced Wa-har-ka, Mexico. This city is located well down in the southwest corner, about 50 miles inland from the Pacific Ocean.

The collective determination of 160 women took six years and $1.4 million to begin production in a factory that will eventually produce 20 tons per year of nopal for sale in California and other U.S. states. You may know nopal by its more common name, prickly pear. Catalina Sanchez, one of the co-founders, said the main purpose is not making money selling the Mena brand nopal to expatriates. They miss the tang of chopped Mexican cactus leaves in a vinegary marinade. This is one of the early efforts to create jobs for husbands and sons so that they will stay home rather than seek jobs north of the border. Twenty-five per cent of the money came from money sent home by their men; $900,000 came from Mexican federal funds; the rest from foundation grants and state government. Workers abroad currently provide over $20 billion annually, a potential resource for similar projects.

Now to the connection with Finley’s book. Explanation of the origin of the color, Red, begins on page 134. For thousands of years, one of the best sources of red came from the cochineal beetle that relies upon nopal as its food source. Use of the color obtained from the cochineal in modern times includes lipstick and other women’s cosmetics, dye for cloth and too many other uses to mention, except for one; the color additive E120, included in making Coca Cola’s Cherry Coke. So who says, "Have a Cherry Coke, get your fill of beetle blood!"?