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Friday, September 15, 2006

What’s So Funny About Mountbatten Pink?

According to the Wikipedia, its own entry for the color Mountbatten pink is fraught with a few problems: namely, the article contradicts itself, several time. Allow me to demonstrate.

Apparently, the color gained popularity when famed British naval officer Louis Mountbatten noticed that a certain ship painted a grayish mauve color seemed to vanish into the sunrise-lit sky earlier than others. He promptly had all the royal vessels painted this color in an effort to make them less detectable during dawn and dusk.
[ link: all about Mountbatten pink ]
The article continues, strangely, that the rosy hue allowed the HMS Kenya — nicknamed “The Pink Lady” — to escape a German attack off the Norwegian coast because the ship’s color was indecipherable from the pink marker dye the Germans used in their shells. Thus, the German’s couldn’t tell the different between a big pink boat and water or sky or the very shots they fired.

The article concludes by stating that the color was disbanded by 1942, as pink ships were easier to see at sunrise and sunset than the traditional gray ones.

Oh, the Wikipedia — home to pointless and factually dubious clumps of words passed off as fact.

Perhaps the best thing about Mountbatten pink, however, is that the article on Louis Mountbatten notes that he was known for carrying on affairs with both sexes and was “widely known as the military as “Mountbottom.” Ha.
[ source: Prance Closer ]

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