July 14 - Ostrich Daily Forecast

"Mummy Brown," said our weatherman. "Have you heard of it?"

"Vaguely," I said. "Wasn't it, like, paint made out of ground up mummies?"

"Exactly," he said. "When Europe was busy raiding Egyptian tombs, somebody noticed that mummy dust was a nice rich brown, and made a durable pigment. They mixed it with white pitch and myrrh and sold it in fine art shops. The Pre-Raphaelites used it like crazy."

"How very Soylent Green of them."

"You're not wrong," he said. "Some artists knew what it was made of, and some didn't. At least one painter gave his tube a funeral, when he found out what was in it, though he must have been fairly naive. They straight-up called it 'mummy brown.' People sold it for two hundred years, and they only stopped when the mummy supply dried up. There are paintings in museums all over the world with a non-zero people content."

"I'm terrified you're going to say this relevant," I said.

"Wellllll," he said.

"Explain," I insisted.

"I don't mean it literally," he said. "Probably. I'm just saying it's the sort of week that might grind a person down a bit, and make them into art."

"I'm not sure I want to be art," I said.

"You might be pretty," he said. "Better art than dirt, if you ask me."