Boo!

Garrison Keillor, at the Writer's Almanac, has a couple of paragraphs about today's holiday/celebration/abomination/whatever it is. As always, Keillor is worth reading or listening to.

Pumpkins are members of the Cucurbitae family of flowering plants, along with squash, cucumbers, melons, and others.

Here's my post on the color orange, and here's my post on the color black, both from over a year ago.

Thanks for reading!

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Addendum: A couple of hours later:

I should have pointed out that, on this date in 1517, Martin Luther wrote his 95 theses, which were, I guess, the beginning of Protestantism.

Butterfly Weed Orange

This flower is a member of the milkweed family. The scientific name is Asclepias tuberosa. (See here for more scientific information)

The linked page says that the root is tough, and was used as a cure for pleurisy by Native Americans. I can attest to the toughness. This beautiful orange perennial grows wild here, and is a common sight along roadways. Several years ago, my wife sent me off on an expedition to dig a few up and transplant them to her flower garden. I dug up 5 or 6, from several locations within a few miles. I don't think I ever got the entire root. That didn't stop the plants from surviving, and I'm guessing that the parts of the roots I left behind also grew and prospered.

A local name is chiggerbush, based on the notion that you can get chiggers from getting near this plant. Maybe. They certainly provide a splash of fairly long-lasting orange color.

If you want a higher-resolution picture, you can get it by clicking on the picture, then finding the different sizes link, at the right, in the source page. (Free Flickr membership may be required.)

Colors: Orange

Most people can distinguish many colors. Interior decorators, lipstick and car manufacturers, and many other merchandisers, want us to recognize many colors, with many names. Here is the Wikipedia article on colors, which includes bistre (!) as a color. As they say, it's a partial list. (See here for the Crayola company's pages on our 50 favorite colors. They don't say how many aren't our favorite colors.)

In spite of our ability to see, and name, many colors, I'm posting a simpler series. Its on the seven colors of the rainbow, as I was taught them in grade school. I'll probably add black, white, and maybe brown. I hope to post in the order they are found in the rainbow: ROYGBIV. Here's the R post.

The word, orange, is said to come from the fruit, not the other way around. Unlike red, orange isn't used in the Bible. There must be reasons for that, but I don't know them. I speculate that the Hebrew and Greek languages had no words for orange, and didn't recognize it as a color. If so, their red and yellow must have been broader than ours.

Orange is the color of oranges, at least some oranges. Orange is a color often used by athletic teams. Clemson University and Tennessee come to mind, because of my present geographical location. There's a quirky comic strip, Rhymes with Orange, which, I believe, is so named because no words do that. (Check it out!)

Orange, the color that is not used in the Bible, and the word that has no rhymes, is a symbol of our uniqueness. We are, indeed, unique before God. No one can exactly replace me. That means that I've got special functions, special things that I should do, if God's plan is to be fulfilled in this world. I hope that writing this blog is one of those!

It is, of course, possible to over-emphasize our uniqueness. We may be unique, but we are no better than anyone else, no more special.

Eat an orange.