We have many means to make colors.

Indigo is a plant dye. Purple comes from sea snails. Carmine red is from beetle shells. Dry it out, grind it up, mix it with linseed oil. Paint.

The earth tones are literally earth. The reddish-brown umber colors started out as the dirt in Umbria, Italy, where the earth is colorful with high amounts of minerals like rusty iron.

Some colors come straight out of the periodic table. Cadmium red. Cobalt blue.

I have a fat tube of ultramarine blue. There’s no ultramarine on rhe periodic table.

I got very excited when I read where that blue comes from.

Guess what ultramarine blue is made from. What would you grind up to make that color?

Yes. Lapis lazuli. They ground up lapis lazuli to make that paint … once. No more. Now sadly, it’s just synthetic, at least the stuff I buy. It’s a Mars tone, not an Earth tone.

Yet … I think I seriously have lapis lazuli beads from the jewelry-making days. And a sledgehammer.

My mother said something once about how my Dad was sprayed with chemical agents when he worked downtown in the ’50s and ’60s.

Mom made that comment in the ’90s. I believe I said, “Wait … what?” because I was about 30. Had I been any younger I would have just taken it at face value and then assumed that was why my parents were hesitant about going downtown. All the mustard gas floating around? That does sound dangerous.

Mom said that evidently the military wanted to see how chemical weapons would disperse in a city, so they sprayed Saint Louis in case they needed to spray the Communists.

It was during the time my Dad worked downtown on 12th Street.

Cut to this past week. Something made me think of that. And now that I am old and have these flashes of clarity, I thought, “Wait … what?”

So. Facts:

1. The military wanted to see how chemical weapons would disperse in a city, so they sprayed Saint Louis in case they needed to spray the Communists.

Not facts:

• It was not mustard gas. It was Zinc-cadmium, which glows under ultra-violet light. I don’t know how they’d shine an ultra-violet light down in St. Louis to see the coverage.

St. Louis was picked because it resembles Moscow, with the river, if you tilt your head.

The blowers that dispersed the chemicals were on the roof of the brutally bad Pruitt-Igoe housing project, which is particularly awful because they picked it because it was a primarily black residence.

Pruitt-Igoe was so legendarily bad they blew it up and never built anything else on that site again.

Not a shining example of the military or Saint Louis.

I don’t remember how old I was when I read about the Minnesota Starvation Experiment. Thirty-six young men starved during WWII so the War Department could understand the best way to bring starving people back to health.

Here is a really interesting article in which the now-elderly participants remember what it was like.

What I remember best from my introduction to it years ago was that the men became obsessed with spices, condiments, gum, recipes, and cookbooks. They combined weird spices, and made reductions of boiled coffee, and then I imagine they whisked the spices and coffee reduction with jelly and made glazed rutabagas. (Evidently, two became chefs afterward.)

There are also stories of these starving men buying donuts for children and dinners for girlfriends just so they could watch someone else eating food. (I suppose that could be what Gary’s doing when he comes back from the grocery store with Pretzel Flipz and broccoli soup.)

Anyway, I think of that experiment whenever I combine two unusual tastes. If it tastes good, I worry a little that I’m starving.

I had a sip of Muscle Milk chocolate protein shake followed in quick succession by a sip of orange Crush before today’s lunch, and it tasted pretty good. I was going to stir them up with a spoon until I thought better of it. I’ll have to try a cocktail of Crush and Muscle milk tomorrow after a full breakfast.

What are we naming it? A Christmas Orange? A Muscle Crush? An Orange Cow? A Moo-Crush? A MMorange? An Orange Moo-lious?

It’s been a long time since I brought a painting into Photoshop to see where things went wrong.

That was what I painted. I’m not going to perfect it because frankly, my mistakes were grotesque. That dog — compared to the original – looks as if he were hit by radiation. He’s doubled in size.

But I’m leaving him doubled, because otherwise I might as well start from scratch. I’ve got a Photoshop image now for every line that can be re-done, and I can re-use a lot of it except for the pedestal he sits on.

When Senator Lindsey Graham died suddenly this morning I turned on the news to check if there was a breach in Senator McConnell’s news blockade, because if both of the President’s right-hand men die in short succession then the opponents on the left will get the side-eye. That was a dizzying string of words, and if you don’t follow the news it’s a bad way to find out that two Southern senators are out of commission in a very divided Senate.

Anyway, after I heard the President speak very coherently about Sen. Graham, the news shifted to Sen. McConnell, and I saw the closed captioning mentioned his childhood polio.

Well, I had no idea Senator Mitch McConnell had polio as a child, like my Mom. He got it at the age of 2, in 1944, about the same time Mom got it … well, the same time almost everyone who survived polio got it, in that slice of time after Sister Kenny and iron lungs but before the vaccine.

That man most certainly has post-polio syndrome, so I imagine his lungs are starting to die.

Of course, that’s solved (in MY head anyway). Now there’s just the mystery of what killed Lindsey Graham.