John -- Here's a snip of something that I consider fun. Let me set this up -- a girl named Lyndsey has inadvertantly discovered a new color. No one else can see it. So she decides to take the piece of newspaper, on which the new color has been created, to school with her and see if anyone else notices it.

Actually, this particular bit is more about the art teacher, but it all ties together:

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On Monday, she takes the crinkled piece of newspaper to school with her. She has devised a way to test people on their ability to see the new color.

What she does is this: she tells each one that she has mixed some colors from existing paints, and she would like their opinion as to which of the mixed colors they feel would look best on a random product – a shirt, a wall, a car, etc.

She does not tell them that there are four mixed colors on the paper. She simply asks them to look at the blobs of paint they see, and decide which one they like best.

She figures that if anyone actually does see the new color, their reaction will give it away.

It doesn’t. No one sees it, or admits to seeing it. At the end of the day, the vote goes 14 for orange, 11 for blue, and 6 for gray.

She asks her English teacher, her history teacher, and her math teacher. None of them sees it, either.

Finally, she goes to the art teacher, a rotund, snowmanlike fellow named Mr. Chastain. (He is often drawn, by his students, with a carrot for a nose, and an old stovepipe hat.)

Mr. Chastain looks approvingly at the newspaper, holds it up in front of himself at different angles, making “mmmmmm” noises as he does so.

“Modern art,” he finally says, favoring Lyndsey with a brief grin. “It is made of nothing and everything, yet people tend to pooh-pooh it whenever they see it. Warhol could have told you that, he understood. A Brillo box. It is art, too, because it represents an aesthetic – a failed aesthetic, perhaps, but then a successful aesthetic generally ceases to be any kind of aesthetic at all.”

Lyndsey has no idea what the man is talking about. She suspects that, perhaps, he doesn’t either.

“A successful aesthetic – do you know what that becomes, Lyndsey? A trend, a tradition, a timeless and tedious inertia. It’s why we have two political parties, really. If you think about it. The common man has no stomach for subtlety, let alone choice, in any real sense of the word. The shame – the real and true crying shame – is that no one cares anymore. Art is art is art, no? No. It’s product, it’s a sellout. Self-sellout, really, because art is art is art is money now. Take out some of the extraneous arts, and art is money. Why? Because it represents the people who create it, and those people are all obsessed with money.”

She wants to interrupt him, but she is stumped as to how or when to make the attempt.

“Creativity has been put into a box, and then the box has been nailed shut. And buried. At sea, or maybe in space. Our creativity nowadays is like a gun with no bullets. You can hold it in your hand and threaten people, but it has no bite. There’s no ammo. All that’s left is a hand holding a gun, and a few memories of loud bangs.”

“Mr. Chastain, I wanted to ask you a question about this newspaper.”

“Hmmmmmm? Oh, yes, of course. I notice you have placed some colors onto a few small areas of the page. It strikes me as an indictment of the world at large. News is product no less than art is product. You combine the two, in a minimalist setting – small dots of color intruding on small bits of news. Reductio ad absurdum. At what point does the relevance, the meaning, the clarity, the direction, disappear altogether? Is this an extra credit project? I’ll tell you what, it shows an interesting perspective on art. The contrast, the colored spots on the black and white newsprint, this is a dichotomy. I like it. It’s good. It’s not MOMA good, but it’s good. I’ll give you a B+. How’s that?”

Lyndsey brushes her hair out of her eyes. “That’s great, Mr. Chastain, I could really use the extra credit, but I also wanted to ask you a question about the colors.”

The teacher peers at the paper again, turns it, shifts it, holds it above his head.

“I like the gray the best, to be honest. It has a sort of solid nobility to it. I could see wearing a suit that color, if I wanted to blend in somewhere and not be noticed. It’s a soothing color. The blue is a bit infantile for my tastes, and the orange is a bit too gaudy. I would say tone it down, add some yellow, make it less metallic.”

“And those are the only colors you see?”

Chastain looks again; and, for just a fraction of a second, Lyndsey is convinced that he sees something there, something different and unusual...

But no.

“Newsprint, a few grainy photos, and a bad drawing of the sun up in the corner with the weather forecast. Oh, and there seems to be an empty white spot for some reason. But I don’t see any more colors.”

He offers the newspaper page back to her. She takes it, and sighs. “OK, thanks, Mr. Chastain. I will think about what you said....”

....until I understand it, which will probably take another 4000 years....

Just for information, if you can't type ten to the twenty second power using superscripts, it is indicated by 10**22. The two asterisks mean "to the power of", one asterisk means "times" like
10*22=220. 10**22 is a very very big number (10x10x10... twenty two times).

I am in the 7th chapter of the story

huh?

i was signed up with the writers workshop and holy crap talk about email flooding!

I ended up having to bow out of the site.

Writers space was good. so was writer's digest.

i got alot of info and help from both of those sites :)

Yes, it helps to be immersed in other languages at a young age I didnt have that. I was in my 30s learning Spanish. And you are VERY fluent in English. You seem to have a better mastery of the english language than most Americans. I almost never see you make a grammatical error. If you didn't tell anyone that you were from elsewhere they would not know that English is your third language.

I Always wanted to speak many languages,, I work with people who know four or five and they make very good money for having taken that effort.