UPS says it has a copyright on the color brown.

[kentauros]

33. Crosley Bendix better trademark Squant soon then!

[font color="deeppink"][font size="5"]Squant[/font][/font]

Squant by Crosley Bendix,
Director Of Stylistic Premonitions, U.M.N.

Good hello, and welcome to the most eye-popping development in the history of vision. This revolutionary innovation in sight is going to make sound simply trivial by comparison, so I'm especially appreciative that the sound obsessed members of Negativland are generously allowing me to introduce it to you on their audio oriented website. If you read the papers, you have probably already heard about the discovery of Squant, but until now details have been sketchy. Many citizens continue to ask me, "Hey, what is this Squant thng anyway?" Well, it's the biggest art related crossover story I've ever confronted in all my years of interpreting aesthetic ambiguities for our relatively unschooled public. No doubt about it, the impact of this will dent many aspects of life outside the arts, if there are any.

Let's start at the beginning. Some time ago, the Optical Institute and Shade Company of Mindinaw announced the discovery of a new primary color. For those who never had any interest in colors and never took the time to study a color wheel, perhaps some background should be sketched out here in order to properly frame the subject. A standard color wheel depicts a hierarchical breakdown of all the hues in the universe as we know it, or as we knew it. A color wheel is divided into what are called primary, secondary, and tertiary colors. Up to this point in time there have been only three primary colors, red, blue, and yellow, the basic building blocks of every rainbow. All other hues are made from combinations of these primaries. The secondary color green is formed from a mix of the primaries blue and yellow, for example. Violet from red and blue, and so on.

But now, a fourth, never-before seen primary color has been discovered. This color has already been named by its discoverer, Dr. Wohan Squant. With a distinctly questionable view of posterity, he has named the fourth primary color "squant," and that has become the very first controversy to taint this shocking discovery. Several international appeals were immediately filed by some of the world's leading authorities on color, disputing the right of Dr. Squant to name this new color after himself. They pleaded for a different naming procedure. However, it turns out that the Divine Spectrum Institute in Naples, the world's supreme arbiter in all questions of color, has ruled that since no new primary color has ever been discovered before in all of human history, there was no precedent for naming procedures, and therefore Dr. Squant was free to establish that precedent. That, of course, means that any future primary color discoveries will probably bear the name of their discoverers.

Now, a little more about the color squant itself. I must admit I have not actually seen the color, in color, myself. So far, there have been only black and white photos of the color in the Mindinaw newspapers which, unfortunately, are not quite up to the standards of USA Today. In fact, USA Today is unable to print the color of squant until a supply of squant ink is produced. In the gray register, squant appears to look very much like a light cerulean blue or a perhaps a mid-range oxide green but, of course, it isn't. It is reported by those who have seen it that squant is a very unusual-looking color, but that goes without saying. Like all primary colors, it is extremely difficult to describe in terms of comparison. It's not really anything like red or blue or yellow. No, like its better-known two brothers and sister of the primary family, squant must be visually experienced to be known.

. . . . . .

Crosley Bendix,
Director Of Stylistic Premonitions, U.M.N.
was born in Canberra, Austria in 1940. His father was chief speech writer for the U.S. Embassy's Cultural Attache in Sydney. His mother was the former Toy Celica of the Coastal New Brunswick Celicas. Mr. Bendix attended the Ecole des Rules in Sydney, then returned to the United States with his father, who fled Austria under threat of copyright litigation. In the U.S., Mr. Bendix attended the Andover Under School of Arts & Handiwork, took his degree in Social Esthetics from Montana State College, and his Master of Bachelors from the Marriage Institute of America.

(more at link)