Sir: As I’ve been walking around the city these last few weeks, I’ve certainly been noticing a lot of pink. Skyscrapers are lit up pink. Fountains are running pink. I thought at first I might have pinkeye, but my opthamolo— my optphomalo— my eye doctor says that’s not how pinkeye works. And she was wearing pink, too, and she had her office decorated in pink.

So clearly a lot of money has been spent this month on making things pink that are normally not pink. And that started me thinking: Suppose we all decided to make a little sacrifice to make the world a better place. Suppose we took all that money we spent on making skyscrapers and stadiums pink, and put it to some good use. Think of what we could accomplish! I was thinking, merely as a suggestion, that we could put it into research to find a cure for breast cancer. Maybe we could wear little pink ribbons to let the world know we’ve donated our pink money to breast cancer this year, and maybe we could put out pink yard signs and shine pink floodlights on our… No, wait, I think I’ve got stuck in a loop here. Forget everything back to the ribbons. But, yeah, research to end breast cancer—that would be a good way to use the money we’ve been spending on pinking things up. Or maybe research to find a cure for conjunctivitis. —Sincerely, Le Promeneur solitaire.