A Giant Color Explosion, or Man! Did you see that? happened at *The Institute at roughly 4:24 AM this morning. Story to follow below.

An accident of epic proportions has occurred here in the media department at The Institute today. There has been a terrible color explosion. You can see some of the results in the image above which is supposed to be of a quiet subdued pastel fall scene. What we have here instead is the equivalent of a color tsunami. A fall scene gone incredibly bad. Color chaos of monumental proportions. At first we were mystified as to how this could happen. We were clueless and this was much different than our usual every day cluelessness. It wasn’t until we started getting calls flooding our switchboard with frantic warnings that something had gone terribly amiss with our color development process that we realized ” Holy Pixels, we’re in deep Kimchi” as our Korean friends like to say. Calls of “My eyes, my eyes” and “turn if off, for god’s sake turn it off” were heard on almost all three of our incoming lines paralyzing our ability to call the Kodak “Colors Gone Wrong” hotline. We were on our own. We had to figure this out without any competent help and quick, before all ten of our readers including our international readers from other countries saw this.

It was “chaos in the coat closet” as we like to say in that pixel drenched, color saturated room that houses our media department. Senior techs and rank interns alike were bursting into tears as they ran about screaming and banging into things. The sound of palms smacking foreheads became deafening. Forehead lumps as big as hen’s eggs began to appear on the foreheads of some of our senior technicians as they began to grasp the significance of the problem. The same sounds of palms smacking became even louder as those in charge began smacking the foreheads of hapless interns that should have been smacking their own foreheads in frustration but weren’t. They needed a smack just because they were there and had probably caused the problem anyway. The entire department was in a color shambles.

We had no idea how far-reaching this problem was. Did it get into our collection of tasteful female studies rendering them, so to speak, too colorful? Did it paint our animal collection in unnatural tones making them unrecognizable, much like that horse of a different color we saw in Wizard of Oz? Did it extend into our collection of prize-winning black & white images of famous garden vegetables? Could our entire out of control color program roll down the mountainside affecting independent color processing labs in town? Should we evacuate? The questions seemed endless. Was there anyway to contain the truth of this fiasco before it besmirched our reputation? Would we have to ‘LIE’ to save our phony baloney jobs? Again?  An immediate call was put into the White House for advice. So far they haven’t returned our call even though we made it plain we needed help with a big lie. An enormous lie. The spokesman in the Whopping Huge Lie department we got a hold of said they were busy. Call back later. It seems they have their own problems to deal with.

It wasn’t until our pixel tanks began to run dry that we discovered the cause of the problem. And yes it was intern related. We keep our colors stored in individual tanks much like those shiny big stainless steel tanks you see in brewery’s. We call them Color tanks. The primary uncolored pixels that need to be colored and arranged to form the images we display on our daily posts are in adjacent tanks. Which we call the Pixel tanks. The process is fairly simple. When we get an image to process for our daily post, we lay out the blank image surface material, a flat paper-like material called the picture, on a movable platform that is located directly beneath the nozzles of each of the Color tanks. Using algorithms and arcane sorcery we then move the correct amount of pixels from the Pixel tank with a no. 8 scoop shovel to the correct Color tank containing the needed color to impregnate those pixels prior to the pixels being dripped or drizzled or squirted onto the image surface. It’s really very simple. The intern of the day gets a list of colors needed from the Color Section Specialist each day with the color application data that tells it (the intern) which colors should be applied and in which order to apply them, to create the wonderful images you see here on The Institutes posts. It is very important that the colors be applied in the proper quantity and in the proper order. “Do not deviate.” we say. We tell this to all of our deviates. “Do not deviate. Really, don’t do it.”

It seems that the intern on duty whose name shall not be mentioned but whose initials are Lloyd Armstrong Custer, yes a direct descendant of that magnificent decision maker George Armstrong Custer himself, took it upon himself to change the order in which those colors should be applied. Now see, he shouldn’t have done that. That’s what caused the problem. That was really stupid. Everyone knows that yellow and orange are dangerous colors to use together anyway and the utmost care must always be taken when using them next to each other. But it gets even more important, like on a magnitude of say a thousand bazillion times more important, when adding the color purple. Especially the shade of purple like what is on those rocks there to the left of the tree in the middle of the image. It is critical to put that purple color on first before adding any yellow or orange. Failure to do so leads to catastrophic consequences. Well he didn’t. He added it after while the yellow and orange was still wet. The colors then began to mix and well it was shortly after that the tanks began to blow and Rainbow Lloyd as he would be forever known, left the building along with roof. The yellow and orange mixed with the purple on the picture surface and that tore it. That lethal combination did what it does, which is blow sky freaking high and the rest is history.

So far we are still picking up the pieces, checking to see what damage has been done to our priceless inventory of old Nixon photos and other irreplaceable treasures, calling Kansas city to see if they have any of our tank covers, and reluctantly looking for any sign of Rainbow Lloyd. Someone found what may be his shoe. Maybe not. So if you think that perhaps that image above is a little overdone, you’ve got a good eye. It is. Sorry.

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