Today is our forth and final (until further notice and request) part of out Green Doodles. What we must say is that we had enormous fun writing them, and even more fun researching upon them. And we really hope that you have fun too reading them.

Some of the things we wrote here were out of our curiosity for them, but some of them were written as a request from our readers, which wanted to know more on green tea, aliens, the green M&Ms and so on.

Green Tea

We have to start by saying that there is no other food or beverage that is known to have as many positive health benefits as green tea, and to prove it there are record showing that the Chinese used it as a medicine ever since 4000 years ago. Green tea has been used as both a beverage and a method of traditional medicine in most of Asia, including China, Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, Korea, India and Thailand, to help everything from controlling bleeding and helping heal wounds to regulating body temperature, blood sugar and promoting digestion.

The secret of the green tea lies in its high content of anti-oxidants, which are extremely efficient in preventing and also curing cancer, lowering the LDL cholesterol and inhibiting the abnormal formations of blood cloths that lead to thrombosis.

What makes green tea so special, among the other forms (black, oolong) is the way in which it is processed. Green tea is made from unfermented leaves and reportedly contains the highest concentration of powerful antioxidants called polyphenols. By contrast, black and oolong tea leaves are made from fermented leaves, which results in the EGCG being converted into other compounds that are not nearly as effective in preventing and fighting various diseases.

Since we don’t want to go any more into its curative properties, we are sure you know all the diseases green tea is good for, or into its etymology since it is far too complicated for us, we thought that might be of interest are the various tea drinking customs.

There are several special circumstances in which tea is prepared and consumed, some of which you can find here:

• Serving tea as a sign of respect – in Chinese society, the younger generation always shows its respect to the older generation by offering a cup of tea.
• Serving tea at a family gathering – Chinese family values are shown by how often younger and older families meet and serve tea together.
• Serving tea to apologize – in Chinese culture, people make serious apologies to others by pouring tea for them.
• Serving tea to express thanks to your elders on one’s wedding day – in the traditional Chinese marriage ceremony, both the bride and groom kneel in front of their parents and serve them tea. That is a way to express their gratitude.
• Serving tea to pass on the tradition.

In Japan though, tea has been brought about 1000 years later, in the 9^th century, form China, by the Buddhist monk Eichu, this according to the legend. The form of tea popular in China in the era when Eichu went for studies was “cake tea” – tea compressed into a nugget. This then would be ground in a mortar, and the resulting ground tea decocted together with various other herbs and/or flavorings.

Quotes about “GREEN”

Green has not only been a source of health, food, beverages and many more, but it has also been an inspiring source of different quotes and funny sayings, some of which, we will give you right now:

• If you refuse to be made straight when you are green, you will not be made straight when you are dry – African Proverb
• If I keep a green bough in my heart, then the singing bird will come – Chinese Proverb
• Lord, keep my memory green. – Charles Dickens
• O! beware, my lord, of jealousy; It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on – William Shakespeare
• An optimist is a person who sees a green light everywhere, while a pessimist sees only the red stoplight… The truly wise person is colorblind. –  Albert Schweitzer
• You could cover the whole earth with asphalt, but sooner or later green grass would break through – Ilya Ehrenburg
• A hedge between keeps a friendship green – German Proverb
• The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. – Dutch Proverb
• One piece of green wood is enough to stop the others from burning. – Bahaya proverb
• Green maize abounds at the houses of those without teeth – Shona Proverb
• Three things cause sorrow to flee; water, green trees, and a beautiful face – Moroccan Proverb
• Green with envy = appearing jealous; appearing envious.
• Sure as God made little green apples = absolutely certain.
• Have a green thumb = to have the ability to grow plants well.
• Green around the gills = looking sick
• Give somebody/something the green light = to give permission for someone to do something or for something to happen.
• The green-eyed monster = the feeling of being jealous.
• The rub of the green = if you have the rub of the green, you have good luck, especially in a sports competition.

Why are aliens green?

Why we chose “aliens” as our final topic for today’s doodles? Apart from being a requested topic, we were interested ourselves to find out why, in the acceptation of so many, are aliens always depicted as green little monsters. Here is what we found out!

Considering the fact that aliens are, in fact strange to our knowledge, we can only think of the answers to this question. And for that, we have three variants. The first of them is that taking into consideration that nobody has yet seen creatures from outer space, and that at this point into history they are imaginary, green is really the alien color for skin. Coloring their skin green, in our imagination is nothing but the attempt to separate them, in our minds, from the society. So in early space fantasies and science fiction stories, one way to make them appear extremely different from us was to imagine them as having a completely nonhuman color.

The other hypothesis, that is somehow related to the one stated above is that if you stick to nonhuman colors for skin, you can stay completely away from any racial associations or symbolism, in much the same way that Sesame Street has a lot of blue guys and other toy colors for people.

Finally, once “little green men” became a cliché for Martians, the cliché kept repeating itself. In cartoons, all you have to do is show little green guys with some kind of weird things around their heads or faces, and the audience knows you mean space aliens. It’s an easy kind of shorthand for humorous purposes.

If, in fact aliens do exist, we believe it is a matter of one’s choice. So far the skeptics have their disbeliefs, while the believers have reason to think they are true. What is true is that we have now finished our green doodles’ chapter number four and we really believe you loved it!

Here is the third part of our green doodles. Seeing the need of knowledge that many of you have expressed during our “Green Doodles” campaign, we try to diversify as much as possible our subjects each week, without forgetting our main piece – green. We have found out many interesting things ourselves about this symbol, many things that we had no clue about, but which turned out to be extremely logic, once you’ve looked at them in a different manner than the usual one.
In order to start today’s story about green, we will present to you the ultimate green face known worldwide.

The Green Man
The face in the leaves stares down at us from the roofs, pillars and doorways of our great cathedrals and churches; he appears on second century Roman columns in Turkey and in Jain temples in Rajasthan. He is found all over England, some parts of Wales and Scotland and a few rare places in Ireland.

The Green Man is the representation of a god of vegetation and plant life in the English culture. He symbolizes the life that is found in the natural plant world, and in the earth itself. In the British Isles, a thousand years ago, the forests were vast, spreading for miles and miles, farther than the eye could see. Because of the sheer size, the forest could be a dark and scary place.
The Green Man is typically portrayed as a human face surrounded by dense foliage. Such images appear as far back as the eleventh century, in church carvings. As Christianity spread, the Green Man went into hiding, with stonemasons leaving secret images of his face around cathedrals and churches. He enjoyed a revival during the Victorian era, when he became popular with architects, who used his visage as a decorative aspect in buildings.

Legends connected to the archetype of the Green Man are everywhere. In the Arthurian legend, the tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a first example. The Green Knight represents the pre-Christian nature religion of the British Isles. Although he originally confronts Gawain as an enemy, the two later are able to work together – perhaps a metaphor for the assimilation of British Paganism with the new Christian theology.

Many scholars also suggest that the tales of Robin Hood evolved from Green Man mythology. Allusions to the Green Man can even be found in J.M. Barrie’s classic Peter Pan – an eternally youthful boy, dressed in green and living in the forest with the wild animals. Today, some traditions of Wicca interpret the Green Man as an aspect of the Horned God, Cernunnos.

Famous Green Characters
As we have seen so far, green surrounds us in many legends, myths as well as many urban legends as well. It has been with us, surrounding us, from medieval times and will remain for centuries to be.
Seeing this, people started to put green in everything – from paintings to architecture, from ancient forms of art to contemporary works, green is surrounding us wherever we are. It is also present along with our most beloved TV characters, the ones we grew up with and that we love dearly.

One of these characters is the Green Lady from Star Trek. She is Marta, the nutty but nubile green lady from the 1969 “Star Trek” episode “Whom Gods Destroy”. But unfortunately for her, she is not the only green lady in Star Trek; Susan Oliver played a lime-colored hottie in the original pilot, “The Cage,” and popped up again in the “The Menagerie.”

Another green figure in the entertainment sector are, in fact, 5: the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird were just goofing on comic-book trends in the early 1980s when they cooked up the idea for these heroes on the half-shell. Comics, cartoons, toys, live-action TV shows and films, video games and all sorts of merchandise have turned the pizza-loving Michelangelo, Donatello, Raphael and Leonardo into iconic adventure heroes for several generations of young fans.

“You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry!” is the line that made The Incredible Hulk, another well known and beloved green character, what he is today. The producers of the Hulk came up with this idea after taking a page from “Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde” and little did they know what this will turn out to be. Did you know that in his first appearance Hulk was gray?

From a Grinch to a grump, we bring you the garbage genius of Oscar the Grouch, the fuzzy misanthrope of Sesame Street who sings “I Love Trash” and gives everybody a major ration of grief. Oscar is given voice by the great Caroll Spinney, who specializes in sweet and sour, as he is also the voice of Big Bird.

With the line that will stay in the animated cartoons history for a very long time: “Ogres are like onions”, Shrek is one of the most loved green characters of our times. Don’t be surprised to find him here because we found out that “Shrek II” is the fourth-highest-grossing film in American history! And here is an inside tip: Mike Myers said that he modeled his Shrek voice on the inflections his mother used while reading him bedtime stories back in his youth. Ouch!

There’s been a lot of frogs in pop culture (the Budweiser frogs, Keroppi, Frogger, Dig’em from Sugar Smacks) but the only one strong enough to jump on this list is Jim Henson’s gentle soul from the swamp. On “Sesame Street,” the silver screen and “The Muppet Show,” Kermit was the most warm-blooded amphibian ever.

The great and powerful wizard of the George Lucas universe is a towering figure in pop culture, even if he’s shorter than a Jawa. Yoda is our final character for today and don’t forget: “Do or do not… there is no try.”

Green Houses
For many years now, people started to be worried about the environment and tried to reduce the consumption of materials, energy and, in the end, everything that involves carbon dioxide as much as possible. We have done our best to reduce CO2 emissions by eating green, living green, traveling green, but this was not enough.

The concept of building green is extremely familiar today, but still holds the high price of almost luxury, even though it is merely a matter of will and involvement. Unfortunately, not many people have a green house or home, motivating their choice with the price that this choice involves, but what they don’t know or consider is that it is not necessary to build one from scratch; nowadays, just making some minor modifications on your already-owned house can spare you a whole bunch of CO2 emissions.
Therefore, we will try to concentrate on some tips that can help you make your house green, instead of saying what building with green materials is all about. There are a lot of things that you can do in order to make your home CO2-emissions free, some of them are really easy and simple and costs-free, some of them are a bit more expensive or time-consuming.

First and foremost, the ultimate modification that everyone should make is greening up your appliances. Get ride of the old fridge, which is the biggest energy-consumer appliance in a home, and basically every electronic that is more than 10 years old. Energy Star-qualified appliances use 10%-50% less energy and water than standard models.

The second tip that is easy to do and saves you some money as well is watching the temperature inside the house by keeping the thermostat low when is cold outside and up when it is hot. Each degree below 20°C(68°F) during colder weather saves 3%-5% more heating energy, while keeping your thermostat at 25°C(78°F) in warmer weather will save you energy and money.

Saving water goes without saying into this list as a major modification of you habits that will not only help you and your savings, but the most important will help the more unprivileged people.

Cleaning can also be green and think of all the money you can save if you stop buying all those chemicals that help you clean up your hose, and start making some of your own with a little help from plain soap, water, baking soda (sodium bicarbonate), vinegar, washing soda (sodium carbonate), lemon juice and borax.

Compact Fluorescent Light bulbs use 66% less energy than a standard incandescent bulb and last up to 10 times longer. Replacing a 100-watt incandescent bulb with a 32-watt CFL can save $30 approx in energy costs over the life of the bulb, so let the light be green also.

Last but not least is saving the trees by saving the paper that you use. You can buy “tree-free” 100% post-consumer recycled paper for everything from greeting cards to toilet paper. Paper with a high post-consumer waste content uses less virgin pulp and keeps more waste paper out of landfills.

These are not all of the tips we can provide you with. You can do a lot of other ingenuous things to save our planet; the most important thing is for you to wish to make a difference.

This completes our Green Doodles for today, but do not panic – there are more to come!

Upon seeing your interest in green after last week’s blog post, we decided to give you more information on what “GREEN” means in different chapters of our lives.  This week we will see what is hidden behind the color green in science, how is green seen in the fantasy world and what is green about religion.

Green in science

Many minerals provide pigments which have been used in green paints and dyes over the centuries. Pigments, in this case, are minerals which reflect the color green, rather that emitting it. The number of green pigments and minerals is so large that it will take us forever to name them all, so you have to just believe us. One of the few we will mention however is the emerald, which is colored green by trace amounts of chromium and sometimes vanadium and is thought by many to have the most beautiful and inciting shade of green. Copper is the source of the green color in malachite pigments, chemically known as basic copper carbonate. An interesting fact is that a long time ago, at the beginning of paintings, painters would use copper in the form of verdigris mixed with wax and turpentine to create green pigmentation in paints. Mixtures of oxidized cobalt and zinc were also used to create green paints as early as the 18th century.

There is no natural source for green food colorings which has been approved by the US Food and Drug Administration. However, chlorophyll, the E numbers E140 and E141, is the most common green chemical found in nature, and only allowed in certain medicines and cosmetic materials. Green S (E142) is prohibited in many countries, for it is known to cause hyperactivity, asthma, urticaria, and insomnia. Apparently, not everything about green is calming, relaxing and pain relieving.

In order to create green sparks, which we love when talking about any kind of party, fireworks use barium salts. Smoke can be turned into green shades by a mixture of different chemicals, like: solvent green 3 or lactose.

Green is common in nature, as many plants are green because of a complex chemical known as chlorophyll which is involved in photosynthesis. Animals typically use the color green as camouflage, blending in with the chlorophyll green of the surrounding environment. Most fish, reptiles, amphibians, and birds appear green because of a reflection of blue light coming through an over-layer of yellow pigment, but the perception of color can also be affected by the surrounding environment.

Green in both old and fantasy worlds

In many folklores and literatures, green symbolizes nature and all of its attributes, particularly those of life, fertility, and rebirth, but also resurrection and immortality in Ancient Egypt: the god Osiris was depicted as green-skinned. Stories of the medieval period talk about green as representing love and the base, natural desires of man. The Chinese term for cuckold is “to wear a green hat“, that is why it is extremely rare to see any Chinese man wearing a green hat. Green is also used to describe jealousy and envy.

We have also discovered that green has signified witchcraft, devilry and evil because of its association with faeries and spirits in the early English folklore. Because of its association with decay, actor Bela Lugosi wore green-hued makeup for the role of Dracula in the 1927–28 Broadway stage production. In the Celtic tradition as well, green was avoided in clothing for its association with misfortune and death. Green is thought to be an unlucky color in British and British-derived cultures, where cars, wedding dresses, and theater costumes green are all the objects of grim superstition.

Green in religion

Green is known to be the traditional color of Islam and there are several reasons for this, but the two most important and worth-mentioning are that Muhammad says that “water, greenery, and a beautiful face” were the three universally good things and the second one is because, for the Islamic people, green symbolizes the Paradise. This idea came ever since the desert-dwelling Bedouin tribes gathered at an oasis, so rare to be found.

Roman Catholics are known to wear green vestments at liturgical celebrations during Ordinary Time. Green is one of the Christmas colors as well; this is dating back to pre-Christian times, when evergreens were worshiped for their ability to maintain their color through the winter season. Romans used green holly and evergreen as decorations for their winter solstice celebration called Saturnalia, which eventually evolved into a Christmas celebration.

This sums up the second part of the doodles we are sharing with you today. We really hope you had fun reading them and maybe you have enriched your acknowledgments concerning green a bit more. Next week we will bring you into our times, talking about famous green characters, quotes about green, but also living green.

Although many people use the word “green” several times a day, constantly, how many of you have ever researched a bit over what green really means or has meant in the past. We were curious to find out the answer, so starting today we will try to sum up the most important features that must be known by everyone, when talking “green”.

The color green
Of course, we have to start with the most basic of all meanings, and that is the color green. According to Wikipedia, the color green is not a primary color, since it is created by mixing blue and yellow, or cyan and yellow. Looking at it on a RGB color wheel, the complement of green is magenta; while on a color wheel based on traditional color theory (RYB), the complementary color to green is considered to be red.
There are 57 different shades of green attested in the world, and when you look at them, you can actually see the difference! The natural greens, from forest to lime, are seen as tranquil and refreshing. Green is considered the color of peace and ecology and it affects us at a physical level in different ways: it relaxes us mentally, as well as physically, it helps us get over depression, nervousness, and anxiety and it offers us a sense of renewal, self-control, and harmony.

Green Holidays
The most well-known holiday all around the world that uses a bunch of green is Saint Patrick’s Day. This holiday was originally a Roman Catholic feast day for Ireland’s patron saint, celebrated only in Ireland since before the 1600s. But it evolved into a secular holiday in the 1700s, when Irish immigrants had the opportunity to make a political and cultural statement along with celebrating St Paddy’s Day abroad.
Nowadays, it evolved into a transcontinental holiday, being celebrated all over the world, from Taiwan to Oslo. But why the color green? According to some sources, blue was the first color associated with St. Patrick’s Day, but that started to change in the 17th century. Green is one of the colors in Ireland’s tri-color flag, and it has been used in the flags of several Irish revolutionary groups throughout history. Ireland is the “Emerald Isle”, so named for its lush green landscape. Green is also the color of spring, the shamrock, and the Chicago River, which the Midwestern city has dyed green on St. Patrick’s Day for the past 40-odd years.

Green in urban legends
This urban legend about green that we learned from Urbanlegends.com it has first seen the light of day in America, in the 1970s. What do chocolate, green, ladies and fertility symbols all have in common? Our urban legend of today: green M&Ms are aphrodisiacs.
We all know the graphical representation of the red M&M and the yellow one, but how many of you have seen the Mars Company representation of Green M&M? Not many, I know, because a lot of controversy has been floating around this particular sweet candy. I’ve have heard it theorized that the color green has been a symbol of fertility from time beyond history, but nothing convinces me that tale has a solid truth behind it.

The interesting part of this story is that in 1991, “a smart cookie with a head for a fast buck”, Wendy Jaffe, picked up on the ‘Green M&M’ myth and went in business producing generic green chocolate filled pill shaped candies she named simply ‘The Green Ones’. In order to advertise her candy as much as possible, she started affirming “They make you horny”. Just to prove it, she went on a TV show, “Studs,” and dated two men from the show. One man she gave a package of her candy, the other she didn’t. One man got much more action than the other. This proved positive the magical power of her candy. But this didn’t matter for Mars Company, which decided to sue her for her action.
In the end, the good folks over at Mars denied the Green M&M having the power to seduce anything more than that big dumb M&M yellow peanut.

This completes our doodles for this week. We hope you had fun finding out new and interesting things about Green. Check in with us in the next weeks, to find out more and more about it.