In defense of brown
The launch of the Zune MP3 player, which comes in black, white and brown, triggered a wave of scatological derision. Maledicta, the journal of swearing, says swearing is culturally-specific. Catholic nations tend to be disgusted by blasphemy, Indians by family insults, Japanese by rudeness, Americans by bodily functions. So, many American geeks are repeating ‘brown = turd!‘ ad nauseum with all the glee and insight of a preschooler.
Similarly, a revolting new Indian TV commercial for Fair & Lovely skin bleach equates brown with filth. A model about to lose a part wins it back by wiping a window free of grime so the casting agent can see how light-skinned she really is.
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You will be assimilated |
I’m a fan of MP3 players without moving parts because they’re more reliable when jogging. The iPod Nano is a brilliant piece of kit, and I’m not sure I like the Zune shade of brown. But this brown-is-dirty meme needs to be nipped in the bud. I am a brown partisan. I’m into shades of ultrabrown.
Bodily effluences come in a wide spectrum of colors. Pus and semen are white, decayed teeth are black, bruises and phlegm come in yellow and green. If you drink enough indigo carmine you can actually pee blue.
Brown is an earth tone, the color of sourdough, pizza crust, cookies, chocolate, cinnamon, crepes, Cuban cigars, suede, corduroys, khakis, camouflage, spotted fawns, natural sugar, UPS, hipster tees, brown paper packages tied up with strings, the skins of potatoes and subcontinentals. When the Gorebot needed to be humanized, Naomi Wolf dressed him down in brown. D’Angelo and India.Arie wrote odes to brown.
Brown plays nice with sepia, red and green. Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself. I am brown, I contain multitudes.
on Tuesday, December 19th, 2006, 2:56 am in Fashion, Humor, Musings, Tech › 
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Incidentally your post was picked up by Salon..
if you eat a fair amount of beets, they also change the color of your urine to a pale red.
The bleach ads get on my nerves as well. It is very prevalant in telugu movies as well where the lighting is done “right” so that the hero/heroine look “fair”.
Word. I may be black but my skin is brown.
Less puss, more dark choclate, ya heard?
Not to mention that if you eat asparagus, your urine smells funny too!
i just realized.
myskintone is 3down 5 right.
Brown is also the color of several cute animals such as bunnies, ducks and a great many puppies. :)
Don’t fprget that 80s classic in praise of “Golden Brown”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsnWwkYnEGA
What a bullshit-meme, skillfully provided by the “liberal media”: Gorebot needed to be humanized….
Six years on, who needs to be humanized: George W. Suddam-Hussein-for-3000-soldiers Bussh, of the Al “Inconvenient” Gore?!
Read http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh122906.shtml for more, please.
Oh c’mon, substance aside he comes across as a terribly pompous orator. Stentorian was coined for his voice.
And don’t even mention him in the same sentence as remedial-reading Skippy from Crawford.
best brown thing that smells good and tastes good is coffee…and there are so many shades and types of brown coffee’s sold all over the world..starbucks brown, barista brown,smell and color of south indian filter coffee love them all..