The Ubyssey, a sky-blue pink thinking robe, and the purple love cow

And here's another clickable article.

Have you ever heard of the Purple Love Cow? If so, then I am proud. In 1982, a new student at Qualicum Beach Junior High School, I had very few friends in my new school and used to travel to Nanaimo to hang out with old friend Y. Ipsalalexi. She and I were both from the East Coast (Newfoundland and Newe Brunswich respectively) and found some things on Vancouver Island quite funny - like the idea that people actually went cow tipping. So we invented a different game: the search for the Purple Love Cow. Of course we never searched for it ourselves, but rather tried to get others to believe in it... and search for it. (Why purple you ask? Well, it sounded shorter and more believable than the Sky-blue Pink Love Cow which is what I might have been inclined to call it).

The expression sky-blue-pink appears in the first collection of Uncle Wiggily stories, Sammie and Susie Littletail, published in 1910, in which one young rabbit suffers a misfortune: “He splashed around and scattered the skilligimink color all over the kitchen, and when his mamma and Susie fished him out, if he wasn’t dyed the most beautiful sky-blue-pink you ever saw!”

Anyway, it seems this cow travelled to different places with us. I lived in Ottawa, where there is now a bar with a drink on the menu called Purple Love Cow (although I don't recommend it - it being rather a nasty mottled red, blue and purple, tasting sickly sweet and containing a couple of those maraschino cherries that get recycled again and again).

After a couple of years in Ontario (1990), I transferred back West and ended up running into Y. Ipsaralexi on Commercial Street (well, either there or on UBC's campus) and was reminded to not abandon my quest to get people engaged in the search for the Purple Love Cow. Today (2005), while idly spending time on the web, I actually stumbled on my name in a short article by someone recounting a meeting of the University paper's staff which I apparently missed... but in which the Purple Love Cow was also mentioned.

Miss Lam, it appears I must have had at least one conversation with your friend Miss F.