>PS -- And here I might have thought Stalinist-style gray would give you warm happy thoughts ;-)

Luckily, we had that style for maybe just a few years, and then we became very different from the bloc - which reflected on style in pretty much everything. It blossomed out in sixties and seventies, specially in arts and architecture. But the remainders of the old style created enough of it to make some aspects of life just plain ugly.

Imagine my frustration when W3.x came out, and I finally got my first color monitor... where are the damn colors, it's all gray!