Lux Fiat

Uncle Ken's battle with the condo board reminds me of the time when I was a janitor at a high-rise apartment building on Lake Shore Drive.  It was a summer job, and the building was pretty new, twin towers of 28 stories each.  Not a tall building by today's standards but still a swanky structure in the late 60s.  The apartments were all rental units, this being before the condofication of the housing market,  but even without a draconian condo board there were rules, one of which I thought was a little goofy.  All of the rental units had roll-up shades for the windows, and they could not be changed.  If you preferred Venetian blinds or drapes, tough luck.  The building owners wanted the building to look a certain way, and that was that.

This sounds like the actions of Uncle Ken's condo board, during the holidays they want Marina City to conform to a certain aesthetic standard and have gone so far as to put it in writing.  They want white lights, fine, let them have them.  But Uncle Ken should quit wasting his time wrestling with the greased pig of a rules committee and put his creative mind to work.  All the board cares about is how the towers look from the outside, right?  They want to see white lights twinkling in all of their glory but does Uncle Ken care about how it looks from the outside?  Probably not.  He wants to see colored lights as he gazes out the window; at least this is my understanding.  To make everybody happy it's necessary to design and build a little housing for each light that uses colored filters so from the outside the lights look white but from the inside the lights are colored.  Although this may tax Uncle Ken's crafty capabilities it is early June with plenty of time to figure everything out before the holiday season and a fine way to keep him busy.  There are other possible solutions using mirrors and prisms, taking advantage of the fact that white light is composed of the three primary colors of red, blue, and green but that could get a little complicated and, although a cool project, not worth the time and trouble.