Green Fountains and a new word for sky.

The fountain in Fountain Hills, dyed green.

I was at an Art Fair in Fountain Hills, AZ over the weekend.  Fountain Hills is just to the east of Phoenix, and was built fountain first, name second, then city.  It is the fourth tallest fountain in the world.  They run the fountain for about 10 mins every hour.  At noon on the Sunday – St Patrick’s Day – they dyed it green.  Food coloring, apparantly.  That is a lot** of food coloring.  The fountain you can see here is over 300 ft tall. I didn’t have time to run down while it was green, it was about two blocks away.  The green did not last long.

Had an interesting conversation with one of my neighbors, a jeweler named Paz.  His name is a short anagram of his Aztec names.  The question came up because I thought his last name was Ehecatl because of his email – but the email is for his dance team and Ehecatl means ‘wind’.

I have long been fascinated by the ancient central American cultures, so I could not resist asking him to tell me the Nahuatl word for ‘sky’.  It’s ilwikatl. (Perhaps I should have asked him how to write ‘green fountain’.)