"It is with the greatest confidence that I will pass on the throne on April 30 to my son, Prince of Orange."

Says the Queen of Purple.



I mean Queen Beatrix.

A "concerned sister" gets press petitioning Hasbro to put boys in commercials for Easy-Bake ovens.

"The toy has long been marketed to girls and made in gender specific colors like pink and purple. The calls for Easy-Bake to take on a more gender-neutral stance has been made numerous times in the past."

Funny that it's still okay to call some colors "gender specific." But progress comes incrementally. The day will come when we get our viral video pleading for the end of stereotyping pink and purple as girl colors.

Meanwhile, in Sweden:

Sweden's top advertising watchdog—known as Reklamombudsmannen, or RO—has taken [Toys "R" Us] to task in recent years for catalogs and ads that showcase girls playing with dolls, scrapbooks, and kitchen and beauty toys and boys with guns, cars, trains and tech gadgets....

The Swedish government has been on the front line of efforts to engineer equality between men and women....

"I think it's amazing that they've actually listened to the consumers," [said a female shopper]. "I didn't used to shop here as much before they changed, because I didn't like the way they separated between girls and boys, pink and blue."

Here's what you get with government pressure (and maybe with You-Tube and Change.org):



Somehow, I don't see that photo bringing in any boys that wouldn't have felt drawn to the activity anyway, but perhaps it's intended to make parents feel and act better when their son tells them that's what he wants.

As for the 13-year-old girl's video:



Was that little boy scripted? Leave him alone, and don't put him on YouTube. It seems to me he's already saying he likes to cook and wants a toy oven and the lack of boys in the ads wasn't perceived as a problem. Hold off on the indoctrination and let him discover his own happiness.

Purple crabs... purple crabs....

I only want to see you laughing with your purple crabs.

Purple angles.

A found spotlight.

A conspiracy of...

... purple.

At the Iris Café...

... there's an edge of violet.

At the Pulpit Café...

... sermonize and harmonize.

At the Purple Grass Café...

... things get chaotic, but it all makes sense somehow.

In the Last Geranium Night Club...

... the music is soft and sweet and the lights are deep purple.

At the Orange and Purple Café...

... you can be colorful as you like.

(Photo from Silverton, Colorado.)

A purple infusion.

At the Mauve Café.

Deep snow on Picnic Point. Hazy sun. Beautiful day. Talk about what you like.

"So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late."

The Purpler Tree and the things you talked about last night.

Last night's purple tree opened a flood of conversation. Curtiss said:

Purple is the color of death.

But you know that, don't you?

I said:

I think men don't like the color purple. Women love it to excess, and men don't really understand. Death, indeed!

Palladian said:

I don't like anything Alice Walker ever wrote.

Instead of transcribing my laughter, let me give you a newer and purpler version of the tree that opened the canyons of your minds:



When I stopped my starry-eyed laughing, I said:

But quite apart from [Alice Walker], I think visual perception is partly deeply biological and there's serious sexual discrepancy about purple.

Then Meade said:

"I think men don't like the color purple. "

The professor speaks truth. And she does so in a most colorful way.

I, however, as a man am an exception to the rule: I love purple. In fact, I wear a purple hat and a purple scarf. Men leave me alone while women can't seem to keep their hands off me. That is, as long as I wear the hat and scarf.

Meade inspired me to make the new tree the color of his scarf. And to give him this advice — in case we should ever meet IRL.

Subsequently, Meade asks the guys a great question, and Curtiss gives a great answer. You'll have to go in there and find those things, but don't trip over the things Titus says he's having trouble finding.

Professor Palladian had to step back in and cool us off with this historical lecture:

The word "purple" comes to us from the Greek (via the usual circuitous route through Latin and Old English) πορφύραν, porphura, of the mollusk that produced the only bright, deep, color-fast purple dye available in the world until the mid-nineteenth century. Walk through any art museum and you'll see no bright purple color in any painting produced before then. The color to which the name "purple" referred has changed many times depending on the time period and the culture being discussed. The "Prince" sort of purple that most people think of is not the color of the purple of antiquity. The ancient purple, Tyrian purple, is more akin to the color of a fresh Welch's grape juice stain on a white cotton shirt, only much more intense. Tyrian purple is made from the fresh mucous secretion of a big sea snail that is variously known as Murex brandaris and Haustellum brandaris. It requires harvesting and killing 10,000 of these gastropods to produce one gram of the dye, hence the astronomical price and rarity of the color.

I have a sample of the dye, about 50 milligrams, which cost me nearly two hundred dollars. To put that in perspective, an extra strength Tylenol pill contains 500 milligrams of Acetaminophen alone, not counting the weight of the other ingredients.

As I said, there was no other bright, color-fast purple dye or pigment available to artists until the 19th century. The use of Tyrian purple pretty much died out by the 11th century in the West. Artists could mix purple hues by glazing blue pigments with red pigments, but as there were only three bright red pigments available to artists until the 19th century, two [1; 2] of which faded rapidly and one of which is both too opaque and too orange to actually produce a mixed purple, not many artists bothered.

What changed everything (and by extension, the world as we know it) was W.H. Perkin's discovery and production of the world's first synthetic organic dye: 3-amino-2,±9-dimethyl-5-phenyl-7-(p-tolylamino)phenazinium acetate, or Mauveine, later known as the color mauve. Perkin was, on a challenge from one of his professors, trying to synthesize quinine and failed, producing a black lump. While he was trying to clean the lump out of his flask, he discovered that a portion of the lump dissolved in alcohol and produced a bright purple. Voilà! The first aniline dye, which changed not only the world of fashion and art, but as I said before, changed the entire world. It was through Perkin's discovery and subsequent manufacture of Mauveine and the resulting proliferation of aniline dye research and industry that the first antimicrobial drugs, the sulfonamides (the early examples of which were dye-based) were invented. Not to mention Tylenol, Polyurethane and the whole synthetic chemical industry.

Not bad for a chemical that started as an accident involving a substance (aniline, phenylamine) that stinks of rotting fish. An apt smell for the chemical that was responsible for the rebirth of purple in the modern world, the olfactory memory across the millennia of those vast piles of dead, rotting mollusks that yielded the color of Emperors.

Sex, science, and art — all night long, all because of purple. And trees. You know I'm an Ann Arborist. Here in Madison.

Let the tree be purple.

Time has passed in the Red Clock Café...

... and the ineffable experience of redness has given way to purpletude:

The Purple Pod Café.

It's a place where you can talk about what you like.

The gold and purple river.

(Enlarge: 1, 2.)

On blog dress and lawprof dress.

When did Stephen Bainbridge's blog start looking so devoid of Bainbridginess? Last Friday, I was going to blog about his post on dress codes for law professors, but I was too busy to get to it. This morning, I saw a link on the subject at Memeorandum — which is a great place to see what's getting blogged about — and I clicked a link to a post on the same subject. Reading it, I was all hey, someone stole Bainbridge's writing. There are, as you may know, blogs that just lift writing from other blogs. (It's been done to me.)

Click on the first link up there. Can you tell who wrote it? It's a blog with the nondescript name BusinessAssociationsBlog.com, and you won't see Bainbridge's name anywhere unless you happen to scroll all the way to the bottom of the page and see the copyright notice. I only saw his name — and I looked — when I did a "find on page" search for it, which I wouldn't have done unless I'd recognized it as the writing I'd read the other day when I knew it was Bainbridge's. [UPDATE: My post prompted Steve to put his name in the upper part of the sidebar.]

I think what's happened here is that Bainbridge was so keen on the idea of segregating his business law writing from his other writing — on "wine & food" and "punditry" — that he unwittingly drained it of all personality. He gave it the blandest possible name — BusinessAssociationsBlog — perhaps reflecting a belief about business that it needs to be all business. It's very serious. No funny business. Wear a suit and tie. It had better be a gray or dark blue suit. Don't go jazzing it up with anything flashy like — God forbid — black. In a world where it works to call a business Google or Yahoo, can't we have a little more fun? In any case, you need to have some identity. You can't want your trade dress to be as generic as a gray business suit.

But what should we law professors wear? We've opted out of the practice of law, so we get to claim the perk of wearing whatever we want. True?

Bainbridge is exercised over this article by Case Western lawprof Erik M. Jensen, "Law School Attire: A Call for a Uniform Uniform Code."

Although I don't like anyone — ever — telling me what to do, I found Jensen's article highly amusing. He has my favorite quote about professorial dress, from Tom Wolfe's "I Am Charlotte Simmons":

[H]e had worn a plaid cotton shirt and pants -- nothing remarkable about that. The shirt had had long sleeves, and the pants had been long pants. But this morning he had on a short-sleeved shirt that showed too much of his skinny, hairy arms, and denim shorts that showed too much of this gnarly, hairy legs. He looked for all the world like a seven-year-old who at the touch of a wand had become old, tall, bald on top, and hairy everywhere else, an ossified seven-year-old...

I quoted this back in 2006, as part of my ongoing fight against men dressing like children.

Jensen's in good humor, and it's not a real code:

Faculty members at accredited law schools shall, when on law school grounds or on law school business, dress in a way that would not embarrass their mothers, unless their mothers are under age 50 and are therefore likely to be immune to the possibility of embarrassment from scruffy dressing, in which case the faculty members shall dress in a way that would not embarrass my mother.

There's plenty of fine writing here with tasty references, and it starts a conversation, which is something I love.

But what do I think about how lawprofs should dress? I'll tell you in a minute. First, let's drag Stephen Bainbridge back out here. He begins with: "Fuck that. And the horse it came in on." (Maybe Jensen can write an article about what language law professors should use.)

Bainbridge goes on to say that his clothes style of choice is "grunge," and he insists on feeling comfortable (unless the school pays him extra to dress up). But he does wear a collared shirt and khakis — the usual "business casual" for a man — not sweatpants. It seems he's mainly upset about the idea of wearing a tie. (Did you know, according to the NYT, young guys these days are wearing ties not because they have to but "as an informal thing" and that they even assert that "It just felt comfortable"?)

So what do I think? I think if you're a law professor, you have many wonderful benefits, and one is that you can go with your own personal style. There's so much more self-expression here than in law practice (or judging).

Most valuable is that you can speak the way you like. You can even say things like "Fuck that. And the horse it came in on." You can't say that in court. Personally, I don't want to say that. The worst language I've ever used in class is "screw," and only in the sense of "screwed up." But you can put things in your own way, make offbeat observations, digress, get a laugh. It's quite cool. The main rule, to me, is that you have to give value to the students. You can't be just amusing and indulging yourself. That would be unethical.

As for clothes, of course, you should feel comfortable. It's possible to be comfortable in a suit — at least a man's suit.

(A tie is nothing compared to nylons. I challenge all you men who bitch about ties to wear pantyhose under your trousers for a day at work and report back. In fact, why don't all you guys do that tomorrow? Then blog about it or comment here, because I'd like your opinion — and maybe you'd like my permission to conduct this experiment. If your wife or girlfriend questions you about it, just say that it's a blog meme you got from Althouse. She'll understand.)

So, yes, #1, you should feel comfortable, but there is plenty of room to look reasonably good and to show some personal expression as you dress for the law professing game. It would be sad if everyone resorted to business dress, because it's boring and predictable. Just as your verbal presentation should be varied and engaging for the students, your visual presentation can serve them well too. Be specific, not generic. The students are going to look at you for an hour. A hat, unusual glasses, purple shoes — just about anything can provide a little amusement and a break in the monotony.

So, Steve, maybe a paisley ascot. And sign your blog posts!

Purple or banana-like.

Two orchids. Which one do you prefer?





That says so much about you.

Me, I have a strong preference. I suppose it's easy to tell.