Monochromatic

I was in Marina del Rey last March in a building overlooking the, yes, marina.  The office I was in belonged to a mediator, so I was there for, yes, a mediation.  As is par for the legal course of mediation, it was s-l-o-w moving, so I had time to ponder the world.  More specifically, I had time to ponder the world's sailboats.  With a view of the marina and all her boats-a-docked, I mused aloud to the attorney in the room that I wondered why all sailboats were always white.

The attorney echoed my inquiry and then did what attorneys do so well, he asked someone else for the answer.  He asked the boat owning, justice toting mediator.  Needless to say, as this inquiry stands on terra firma (albeit virtual) and continues to plague me nearly a year later, he did not have an answer either.  If you took the same picture of any parking lot anywhere, you'd have a gumball array of different colored vehicles, so why only white sailboats?

So, I poked an electronic spade into my virtual terra firma and did some mild digging.  A certain Captain Herreshoff was once to have said, "There are only two colors to paint a boat, black or white, and only a fool would paint a boat black." (http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Why_are_sailboats_white#ixzz1CB9RgmqO)  Be that as it may or may not be, that still doesn't explain why; I mean I can speculate, but Nature doesn't seem to harbor the same fool mentality towards black.  Take the all black penguin, one of my favorite all time monochromatic examples.  Have his one in a billion genes made a fool of him, Captain H?  Personally, I find him quite handsome and unique, to which I will conclude that sailors have no sense of individuality, and, furthermore, they probably share the opinion that all cats are grey in the night (and anyone who's been to San Francisco's Castro can well attest that cats come in a rainbow of colors, just like cars, and just like sailboats should.)

Life sometimes can be monochromatic.
monochromatic: –adjective

  of or having one color