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My father is a Carleton grad. Carleton is in Minnesota where it's butt-cold and I remember him once telling me about how you could create huge icicles by dripping colored water at a slow rate from a window ledge. Well, in 1990, I found one of my trusty friends with a room on the third floor and set to work. We took a large rubbermaid trash can cut a tiny hole in the bottom and attached some plastic tubing. I then found a 'regulator' (i.e. a clamp) to slow the flow through the tube and drilled a small hole in the window sill to poke the drip-tube through. We started by coloring the water with food coloring, although we soon found that rit clothing dye was MUCH MUCH MUCH more vivid (and also stained the Bill's bricks).
So in early december we began dripping red water over this window ledge. Within a week we've got an icicle about 15 feet long and two feet around at the base. We kept trying different colors (blue, orange, green, etc.) which made the icicle take on this sickly color, which I'm sure led to my first icicle meeting with the deans.
The deans were dead set against my icicle. They called it an eyesore, and decried its detrimental effects on their building. I assured them (with fingers crossed) that we were using water-based food coloring which would easily wash off when the weather warmed. I also attacked their approach, arguing that they were limiting my 'freedom of personal expression.' Nothing makes liberal deans back off faster than insinuations that they are somehow impinging your freedom of expression.
Finally the deans threw up their hands and let me keep the icicle. They called me in again in the spring though and told me that they were going to have to remove the icicle for safety reasons. By this time the icicle had almost reached the ground, but it kept getting too heavy and breaking off. The deans were worried that someone 'walking beneath the icicle might be injured by falling debris.' I pointed out that to walk underneath the icicle required standing in the middle of a bush, and if someone was dumb enough to stand in a bush under a huge icicle . . . They didn't buy it. Maintenance removed my icicle in early march, just before i began building the hottub.
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