  The red clump giants are potentially very useful as standard candles. There
is some controversy about the stability of their I-band absolute magnitude, but
it does not seem to be serious. No controversy was anticipated about their
colors, with metal rich giants expected to be redder and cooler than the metal
poor giants. The purpose of this paper is to point out that no such correlation
is apparent between [Fe/H] and effective temperature as determined with
Washington CCD photometry for the giants in Baade's Window. No explanation is
offered for this surprising result. It is also unknown why the galactic bulge
red clump giants are redder than the clump giants near the Sun by 0.2 mag in
the (V-I) color.

Astrophysics