The Mysterious Blue Men! The Blue Men. Fear them. When I was a music major at the University of Florida, I (obviously) spent a lot of time in the music building. As any student who has been in the building knows, the staircases are equipped with these rather odd round holes that don't appear to have a purpose. I was often bored in the music building waiting for something to happen, and my friend Jessica and I decided that those holes looked lonely and empty. They needed company. Companionship. Men made out of Play-Doh. Having spent many hours on the music building roof, I'd noticed that there were tons of little pebbles up there. I stole some of them for the men's heads. We took my can of purple Play-Doh and made men similar to the one above and distributed them everywhere; mostly just in the aforementioned holes, but we got pretty creative once we ran out of holes. We went into "the cage"--the place where the instruments were stored--and hid some of our men there. Turned out that Chris, the guy who was in charge of the cage, was rather confused and amused by them. Some were stolen. Others mysteriously disappeared. Our friend Ed helped us "populate" during the next semester. We decided to use orange men this time. We terrorized Chris even more this time, leaving him a note that read something like "Beware, Chris, we are watching you. --The men of the orange population." Jessica defected to the College of Education, so the next semester it was up to me and Ed to populate the music building. We chose the holy Blue Men. They invaded the elevator, the walls, the lockers, and, of course, the cage. This time a blue man was impaled with a thumbtack on Chris's board, with a note that said "We're new, we're blue, and we're AFTER YOU." Another blue man was posed holding the pen. Another was posed threateningly on the lockers facing the cage. Chris commented to me: "I keep seeing these bloomin' blue men everywhere." Chris was very corny. Spring Break 2000, my friend Fred and I revisited the music building and populated with white men. They really got around! They were in the elevator, in the cage, in the bathrooms, guarding water fountains . . . it seems they are unstoppable. Cool! The Play-Doh men will rule. They'll keep changing color, but they will rule. I'm sure they're ruling something somewhere, wherever they ended up. back