khaki

I wonder what's so special about khaki. It seems like such an ordinary color. It's not something very specific like black or white. My various khaki trousers are really quite different colors -- it doesn't look like different amounts of the same dye on more-or-less white cotton. One has more red in the dye, another more green, another more gray. (These must be OBVIOUS differences in color, if I'm noticing them.)

There seem to be a lot of laundry stain removers advertising their ability to remove almost any stain from almost any fabric. As a clumsy experimentalist working with pigments and dyes, this is important to me. Unfortunately, most of them seem to say "not recommended for use on khaki" or "do not use on khaki or fluorescent colors." Sometimes it's in addition to the warnings I expect, about colors possibly fading and stains possibly not coming out. Sometimes it's just kind of there, in isolation, as if my pants are going to explode if I use this stuff on them. Sometimes I think they might as well. I had two kinds of record this morning, what with splattering cyan pigment all over(*) my new khakis less than an hour after putting them on, and with spilling exactly the right amount of cyan on exactly the right kind of khaki to match the green shirt I had on.

(*) It wasn't the overall kind of splattering all over. I was wearing a lab coat, so I just splattered my trousers from the knees down. This is definately low drama.

(no subject)

If I want reasonably priced yogurt, I buy it in the big 2lb cartons and dish it out myself, mixing it with jam in little plastic containers and hoping the lids will be secure in my backpack. This hardly ever happens. I'll have the vague thought in the morning, "I should have packed yogurt last night. Whoops! I need to go now." Then I go. Without yogurt.

If I want convenient yogurt, I buy the little cups, now available in staggering variety. 6 oz cartons have mostly replaced the 8oz ones, with 4oz for little kids. And they don't just have a couple of different flavors of jam, and a choice between non-fat and regular, like they did in the '80s. (Actually, I remember the '70s, when it was weird and exotic to have any kind of yogurt in the grocery store at all. My father did something disgusting with yogurt, eggplant, and mint.) The overwhelming majority of the little cartons have some kind of artificial sweetener in them. They don't always label it prominently, especially with the [obscenity] sucralose.

Last time I was at the store in a yogurt mood, I noticed that Stonyfield Farms has added something to the front of the labels of their little yogurt cups. "NO aspartame, ever!" Well. That got my attention. Stonyfield Farms might have yogurt that's a little too fluid for my taste, and a little more expensive than I really want to pay (even for a convenience food like this.) But they're getting my business. The chocolate-flavored yogurt is nice, but that's not the primary reason they're getting my business. It's just nice not to be able to trust a label.