Yellow

(...)
The word _bulldozer_ wandered through his mind for a moment in search of something to connect with.
The bulldozer outside the kitchen window was quite a big one. He stared at it.
»Yellow,« he thought and stomped off back to his bedroom to get dressed.
Passing the bathroom he stopped to drink a large glass of water, and another. He began to suspect he was hung over. Why was he hung over? Had he been drinking the night before? He supposed that he must have been. He caught a glint in the shaving mirror. »Yellow,« he thought and stomped on to the bedroom.

-- Arthur Dent in Douglas Adams' »The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy«

Most people think of the sky as blue, but I will always think of it as yellow... warm, inviting, home. There was an 80s band called Book Of Love who did a song called »Yellow Sky«... they were an underrated band, and that song cemented my love of yellow skies. (Maybe it's a southern thing, but I doubt it, since Book of Love were Italian...)

The next morning I awoke at dawn and went out on the dirt road to Rainy Mountain. It was already hot, and the grasshoppers began to fill the air. Still, it was early in the morning, and the birds sang out of the shadows. The long yellow grass on the mountain shone in the bright light, and a scissortail hied above the land. There, where it ought to be, at the end of a long and legendary way, was my grandmother´s grave. Here and there on the dark stones were ancestral names. Looking back once, I saw the yellow mountain and came away.

In the town where I was born/
Lived a man who sailed the sea,/
And he told us of his life,/
In the Land of Submarines.

So we sailed into the sun/
'Til we found the Sea of Green,/
And we lived, beneath the waves/
In our Yellow Submarine/

{chorus}
-- The Beatles »Yellow Submarine«

»Once on a dark winter's day, when the yellow fog hung so thick and heavy in the streets of London that the lamps were lighted and the shop windows blazed with gas as they do at night, an odd-looking little girl sat in a cab with her father and was driven rather slowly through the big thoroughfares.«

The beginning of »A little princess«, Frances Hodgson Burnett

According to DIN 4844, there are two ways of marking dangerous things in industrial areas: Black and yellow stripes for moving things (like doors or lifts), red and white stripes for immobile things (like stairs or loading ramps you could easily crash into).

But in the meantime, everything is getting black and yellow, no matter if it is moving or not. Or even no matter if it is dangerous or not. It looks so cool so the stripes got to be put on the edges of tables, any lame stair, doors of supermarkets ...

So how can one recognize of something is really dangerous now?

Anti-yellow would have to be a frog croaking in the marsh, the gullet of a komodo dragon (arguably the most unsanitary place on Earth), or perhaps a Christmas tree. You could say the opposite of yellow is purple on the color wheel, but where's the fun in that? Though, a purple Christmas tree would have to be exceptionally non-yellow.

Yellow is highlighters and construction paper suns, Easter eggs and my dying plants.

I like yellow. It's a happy colour, especially that bright, warm, buttery yellow. What a shame we mean something negative when we call somebody yellow.