Body Hair and Zits

One of my favorite comics strips is the teen-angst documentary that is Zits. Today they seem to be stealing my last blogpost and raising the "EEWWWW!" level to 11.


I hope you all finished breakfast before reading the funnies this morning.

Hair Today, Gone Tomorrow

or
Wax On, Wax Off

I am not a hirsute man. I will never make the centerfold of Bear Magazine (btw, possibly NSFW, ymmv), but as I grow older, past the point where the phrase “middle-aged” is unavoidable, issues with hair seem to be growing. Or not growing, as the case may be. For the better part of a decade I had been in plausible denial about the widening bald spot on the back of my head. My hairdresser knew better than to show me the trim in the back and I just avoided looking into parallel mirrors. Unfortunately, I recently changed to a less discrete stylist and a recent rash of candid group photos with me facing away from the lens have made the scales fall from eyes. That salad bowl sized display of cranial skin will never get smaller. I can live with that. I wear ball caps in the summer and hoodies in cold weather. I refuse to go the combover route and just take comfort knowing that I still have more hair than my celebrity doppelganger, Ron Howard.

It’s hair in other areas that is my concern. Years ago I was in a meeting next to a goblinesque-looking man with ear hair so long that it could have been braided into a pony tail. I vowed never to become That Guy. After a few painful lessons in the difficulty of plucking nasal hair, I learned that personal hair trimmers are reasonably priced and can be purchased discretely at most BigBoxOfChineseCrap stores. I even find the soft buzz of the spinning blades relaxing.

Unlike Stephen Carrell in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, I’m actually fairly proud of my soft dewy mane of chest hair that took several decades to fill in. But a few weeks ago my wife questioned if I would be interested in going to her nail salon to have my back waxed. An inquiry like that is similar to being offered a breath mint. You really shouldn’t refuse even if you don’t think you need it. I made some vague affirmative answer and let it go.

I attributed at least part of her interest in having my back shorn to the marketing skills of the nail tech industry. A decade ago, nobody went to a separate nail salon, but a generation of industrious semi-skilled Vietnamese immigrants have made the stand-alone nail salon as ubiquitous in strip malls as the dry cleaner and the tanning booth place. My wife has latched onto these places as a weekly social activity where she can be pampered and discretely brush up her rusty Vietnamese. As an aside, when the techs at these salons speak in their native tongue and start tittering, they are laughing AT you, not with you, so tip well and don’t be too annoying.

New Years Eve afternoon I was in my man-cave watching the alma mater getting thrashed on the Blue Field of Boise, writing my year end Best Of blogpost, and engaging in other nominally masculine behavior when the phone rang. My wife was at her latest salon (she skips around every few months) and said that there was no waiting for the waxing room. I put my testicles in escrow and went down to join her. Sure enough, the place was nearly empty. My wife was sitting in some sort enormous captains chair that looked it had been lifted from the Hello Kitty themed cockpit of an H. R. Giger spaceship. She had her toes up on blocks getting pedicured and was holding court with the bored techs.

I was led back to the closet sized waxing room by a woman who was a matronly cross between Linda Hunt and Dr. Ruth. She had me take off my shirt and sit in a rolling office chair backwards. The wax was heated nearly to point of scalding and the actually ripping of the wax was done quickly and relatively painlessly. The Velcro separating sound got louder the further down my back she went. I got briefly nervous just how far south she was expected to get me smooth, but to my relief she stopped at the small of my back.

The whole process took just a few minutes. My wife invited me to stick around for more girl talk, but I begged off explaining that I had the second half of an ass-kicking on DVR to get through at home. Truthfully, in my newly denuded state I was just a little self-conscious about hanging around and getting asked to show it off.

My only concern with crossing the hair removal Rubicon is just how quickly and uncomfortably the back fuzz is going to grow back in. I’m hoping to limit the procedure to a semi-annual event like a good dental cleaning. However, I must confess that I find the thought of sitting in a giant barcalounger while young women caress and fondle my feet slightly exciting. Maybe in the spring I’ll go in for a much needed pedicure and get my toes painted a nice manly shade of black or dark green.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Share your personal grooming tale. Go ahead, it’s just us.

Update 1/6/08: The comic strip Zits takes this topic to another level.

Top Ten Tourism "Honor" For Bawlmer

There’s a guy out there named Chuck Thompson flogging a new travel book and his twist is that he tells you how it REALLY is as opposed to the usual puffery travel writers shovel at you. To prove that he is all candid and unvarnished and shit he puts on his book promo web-page a list of the Top Ten Most Overrrated U.S. Tourist Attractions and my adopted Bawlmer makes the cut. Here is what he has to say:

BALTIMORE’S WATERFRONT

Or any derelict city center’s $65 million outlet mall, er, “downtown renovation project.”

What he is trying to say is that all these tacky fake waterfront or historic district tourist areas are Teh Lame. What is great is that he singles out Baltimore’s HarborPlace as the archetypal example. Yes, HarborPlace is a couple of pavilions filled with overpriced gift shops and chain restaurants. Any tourist spot with both a Hooters and a Cheesecake Factory is not “authentic.” And the ticky-tackiness of the dining and retail extends beyond Harborplace itself. The huge gorgeous brick Power Plant has a Hard Rock Café guitar on the smokestack. What other town so proudly wears its middlebrow taste on its sleeve.



What the Baltimore waterfront has is a great view of an open sewer with lots of other attractions within nominal walking distance. The science museum just added a big dino expansion. The world famous aquarium now lets you walk through an ersatz Australia and you can ride paddle boats through the Jones Falls flotsam anytime you want. Baltimore even has the prettiest building full of tacky tourist brochures I have ever seen. It only took dozens of years and bazillions of dollars to build a map dispenser on the last piece of open land left at the Inner Harbor. But we did it.



What we can take pride in is that we are the best of the fake tourist destinations. I get suckered into these areas all the time. The ones that give Baltimore a run for the money are Riverwalk in San Antonio (the granddaddy of the sow’s ear revival trend), the genuinely historic Faneuil Hall and Quincy Market in Boston and the Gaslight District in San Diego. And I have been through some clunkers. Laclede Landing near the St Louis Arch just stunk of Tacky Tourist Drinking District™ flopsweat.

And until some clever entrepreneur decides that there is a market to tour the REAL Bodymore, Murderland and starts offering double decker bus drive-bys (literally) of The Corner/Wire/Homicide highlights, we better stick with our title as the tackiest of them all.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: How tacky is your town's tourist district?

BooksFirst - December 2007

Books Bought
none

Books Read
Sin City: The Hard Goodbye by Frank Miller
Are Men Necessary? by Maureen Dowd
Mushroom by John Aristotle Phillips and David Michaelis
I’m With The Band by Pamela Des Barres

Comments
In clearing the nightstand for NaJuReMoNo, I ran across several non-fiction books that I wanted to get out of the way as well as one graphic novel I just stumbled on.

I borrowed the box set of Sin City from my brother-in-law and made it a father-son movie night. The box set comes with a bound copy of “The Hard Goodbye”, the first volume of collected stories. I think the point was to prove the faithfulness of the movie to the source material. Indeed, most of the dialog is lifted directly from graphic novel. A few lines are cut (and may be restored in the longer cut which I didn’t watch), but image for image, the screen captures the style of Frank Miller’s monochromatic style.

While the Sin City milieu tries to be noir and edgy, the anti-heroes are as superhuman as any hero in spandex pajamas. The dark tone evokes the pre-comics code morality plays. While the stories are gritty and over-the-top, I don’t think I’ll be heading down to Old Town in Basin City any time soon.

Since my sock puppet Mo Modo writes the leading internet Maureen Dowd fansite blog, the Dowd Report, I felt it incumbent on me to read Dowd's book Are Men Necessary? when it came out in paperback. This is as not as big an omission as it would seem. When the book first came out it was heavily excerpted in both the New York Times and the Washington Post. Furthermore, I had already read significant portions while lounging around BigBoxOfBooks. Still it was good to get a good stiff slug of Her Dowdness all in one helping. Finding the book was tougher than it should have been. Rather than following the helpful categories the publisher had supplied, BBoB files it under Psychology-Self Help. If you are looking for Maureen Dowd for advice, you are in trouble.

The book is all about relationships from the evolving roles of the sexes biologically to the nature of women in the political arena. The chapters each loosely tackle a different subject and are written as a series of short 800 word essays, many of which look and sound like her New York Times columns. She takes on “The Rules” and the rulers. She peppers the narrative with anecdotes nearly to the point of too much information. In the section on Anita Hill, she relates how she was hit on between jobs and how she ignored it and carried on with her career. She chronicles the lecherous behavior of elected leaders up to and including Bill Clinton. In her trademarked phrase twisting, she observes that “The Bushes feel the entitlements of the aristocracy. The Clintons feel the entitlement of the meritocracy.” And adds “What is Hillary owed?” That is a theme she is still exploring twice a week until November.

When I was in high school I went through a radical libertarian phase and was fascinated by, among other things, the threat of backpack nukes. My paranoia was justified by two books, The Curve Of Binding Energy by John McPhee and Mushroom: The Story of the A-Bomb Kid by John Aristotle Phillips and David Michaelis. In a fit of nostalgia, I bought both of these books used off the internet a few years back. John Phillips was a Princeton student during the late 70s in danger of flunking out when he wrote a junior year project on how to build a kiloton-range nuclear device for a few thousand dollars (assuming you had the plutonium). The only sources were public domain government documents. His project was partially inspired by The Curve of Binding Energy that predicted a small nuclear device could destroy the World Trade Center and wreak havoc on downtown Manhattan. It turns out that the terrorists didn’t need a nuke, but the effect was similar.

I thought of Mushroom when all the current turmoil in Pakistan cropped up recently. One of the central set pieces in the book is when a clumsy Pakistani diplomat tires to get a copy of the project to aid in Pakistan’s “peaceful” nuclear program. This set off a round of hand-wringing over the wisdom of selling breeder reactors to third world countries, but clearly Pakistan got what they wanted in the long term. The rest of the book is much more light hearted as it chronicles the years Phillips spent at Princeton. The book was written by him and his best friend while they were both in their early twenties and it shows a certain lack of polish. Despite this, it is breezy and funny and just a bit prescient.

I also went through a phase where I read a lot of rock biographies. One book that was always mentioned was I’m With The Band by super-groupie Pamela Des Barres. For years I scoured used bookstores for a copy of this underground classic to no avail. The closest I got was Powell’s in Portland that had a first edition for more money than I wanted to spend. Another book dealer tipped me off that books like that go in and out of print fairly regularly. Sure enough, a new edition came out in 2005. I started it but found the early chapters tough slogging and it has been languishing on my nightstand waiting for me to finish it off.

There is no doubt that Pamela was in the right place at the right time if your goal was to sleep with as many rock stars as possible. The notches on her bedpost include Gram Parsons, Chris Hillman, Jim Morrison (heavy necking only), Waylon Jennings, Jimmy Page, Keith Moon, and Mick Jagger. And these were not one night stands. Whether they amounted to real relationships is a different question, but they definitely occupied some middle ground. Rock stars that knew her recognize her today and the ones that shouldn’t (like Paul McCartney) still act nervous. One of her more permanent flings was with an aspiring actor named Don Johnson long before he quit wearing socks and started wearing pastels. Her descriptions of his clearly abusive behavior and the eyewitness accounts of his courting the fourteen-year-old Melanie Griffith are downright creepy. She also spent time as the nanny to Dweezil and Moon after having a professional relationship with Frank Zappa while she was in the no-hit wonder band The GTOs.

The book is borderline stream-of-consciousness incoherent with frequent passages from her contemporaneous journals that are even more disjointed. They say that if you remember the 60s or 70s you weren’t there. Well, she was there and has the memories to prove it. This edition has a new afterword catching up the narrative a little. Many of her associates from that era, famous and otherwise, did not survive to the 21st century. While Des Barres has no regrets over her rather chemical and hormone fueled youth, she was one of the lucky ones, in many ways.

Blog365 - More Madness

You would think that after the death march that was National Blog Posting Month, I would have sworn off silly self-aggrandizing blog challenges. You’d be wrong. When I first got the bulk e-mail notice that a NaBloPoMo somebody was proposing going for a full year, I thought it was madness. It still is, but when I read the fine print, I found that the definition of a daily post is pretty elastic.

The biggest loophole is that it doesn’t have to be all one blog. Since I keep two and a half blogs already, that only comes to three posts a week each. I think I’m already hitting that. I just need to pace myself better.

My biggest hurdle will be vacations. I have at least one trip planned this year that will make daily posting challenges. I’m going to have to resort to pre-writing or post-dating a few entries to keep the bookkeeping straight, but trips tend to be great blog fodder, so the net effect will be a plus.

Here is my page there if you want "friend" me or toss me sheep or whatever silly WebSocial-2.0.A.(b) thing they do. I'd like to know I'm not the only sucker falling for this.

I post this on New Years Day where people traditionally make all sorts of silly rash promises to themselves. For a blogger, this Blog365 has got to fit right in there with eating better, exercising more, and spending wiser. All good ideas. We’ll just see how it goes.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: How soon until I regret this?

Best of 2007, Part 2

Best of 2007, Part 1 was posted back in June. This post covers July through December.

As I look over my posts since mid-year, I noticed that I have a couple of formulas I follow and several topics I tend to return to over and over again. Here’s my breakdown:

Politics. As the Dubya Administration winds down and the 2008 election gets in gear, I find myself doing more and more political bits. I had a long running feud with Alberto Gonzales beginning with the Torqueberto Top Ten. I also mocked other torture advocates, closeted congressmen, bug-eyed candidates,

Sex, Sex, and More Sex. I found newsworthy blog pegs to talk about sex by college kids, teenagers, senior citizens and porn stars.

Stalking Celebrities. I managed to hunt down William Gibson and Jennifer Garner.

Pop Culture. I handicapped the promising shows of the new season, only one of which stayed on the DVR to the end of the year, but I added Big Bang Theory because it gets the geek right. I also tried to predict the next geek icon to come out of the closet.

Comics. I find myself doing fewer and fewer comics related posts. With the Foobiverse grinding to a halt, my only major snark on it was about the Foobocalypse going out with a whimper. But I have immortalized my hero Ted Forth with his own Wikpedia entry.

Tweener TV. Every time I do a post that references obscure Nickelodeon shows I get a few concerned comments. What can I say? My obsession with the 10-14 demographic started when I discovered Clarissa Explains It All while watching my infant son when my wife was at night school classes. These shows are proving grounds for stars (and scandals) of the future. In my defense, even I was creeped out by the dozens of aspiring underage starlets that mistook one of my posts for an open casting call. Undeterred by this, I did a Sally Forth satire for the New Delhi Monkey Gang. And Jamie Lynn Presley’s condition made me ponder some Very Special Episodes.

Side Projects. I also started two more blogs in the past few months. My intermittently updated China Sights blog was an outgrowth of posts about my trip to China this summer, where among other things, I climbed the Great Wall. I have also made my obsession with Maureen Dowd into a continuing preoccupation with the Dowd Report.

Family Milestones. My son is a senior in high school and marched his last season. I try not to brag too much about him but sometimes I can’t hide my pride when things happen like getting accepted to my alma mater. November was rough on me. I had to say goodbye to my dog just after Thanksgiving and then just a little over a week later my grandmother passed away. That double punch hit me hard, but I’ve shaken off the funk and look forward to a better brighter 2008.

Stay with me. I’ve got plenty of ideas for the upcoming year and hope to even up my game a little.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Let me know what your best post of the year was.

NaJuReMoNoMo 2008

Two years ago I invented a semi-parody of National Novel Writing Month or NaNoWriMo that I called National Just Read More Novels Month or, for not-so-short, the unpronounceable NaJuReMoNoMo. It’s only a semi-parody because I am completely serious about wanting people to read more novels. January is the perfect month for this sort of internet meme. It’s the middle of winter and doesn’t conflict with any major holidays. January is 31 days long, giving people plenty of time to read a book. Folks are flush with cash and gift cards from holiday giving, And they are burnt out from the endless November challenges that require too much work.

Best of all, NaJuReMoNoMo is astoundingly easy. All you have to do is read any novel from start to finish within the month of January. You can read memoirs or non-fiction in January, they just don’t count towards your NaJuReMoNoMo total.

Since this is the third annual NaJuReMoNoMo, I had expected it to be an internet-wide sensation by now, but participants seem to be limited to my regular readers. I thought long and hard and realized that the impediment to its breakthrough was the lame logo. The old logo was something I slapped together and it looked it. This year I ran it through Photoshop Elements and enhanced it. The logo now has a transparent background so it doesn’t clash with people’s templates. The dark letters are embossed with white outlines so they will look fine on dark backgrounds as well. Take a look at the improvement:

Old Lame Logo

New Super Cool Logo

Updated: You can find all the official NajuReMoNo winner badges here.

I also need to up the blatant meme plugging. I apologize in advance, but I am going to be relentless on book blogs and literary sites. If you found this site from a spammish link I have left somewhere, remember that it is never too late to start NaJuReMoNoMo. All you have to do is finish reading a novel by the end of the month.

And if you have a blog that does book reviews or know someone with one, either drop a hint or pass it on to me and I will make a nuisance of myself. Get the word out this year and next year will be even bigger than ever. We’ll get mainstream media attention and in-store promotion from BigBoxOfBooks and OtherBigBoxOfBooks. Maybe even prizes, but don't hold your breath.

Once you have read the novel, you are entitled to post this spiffy badge on your page. Either cut and paste the image or insert the code.

<a href="http://tinyurl.com/2l3mgt"><img style="cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" width="100" src="http://tinyurl.com/2f563u" border="0" alt="NaJuReMoNoMo" /></a>

And since my mad graphix skilz are woefully inadequate, anyone with real talent (I’m looking at you, Dave) is welcome to improve on it. Just leave comments or links or e-mail and we can talk. If I were anywhere decent at it, I would have all sorts of buttons and badges and blinking doo-dads. But I’d rather spend my January reading novels.

Holiday Hook Up

Major plot developments in Liz Patterson's love life tend to occur around the holidays. For quite awhile Liz would run into Anthony at holiday parties and his life kept getting more complicated. He married Evil Theresé and had a kid and still kept making muppet moon eyes at his childhood almost-fling.

Two Christmases ago, Flyboy Warren took Liz up to Mtickitacki to see Paul and she says of the rivalry between the two that Paul had won. This triumph was short lived since Paul moved on once Liz fled back home.

This year Anthony gets taken to Christmas dinner at Mike and Deanna’s new digs (which is a result of the fire last Christmas Eve, my how time flies). Rather than dropping Liz off at her apartment, Anthony drives her home. Take that anyway you want.

It’s hard to believe that thirty years after Joanie Caucus and Rick Redfern did the dirty in Doonesbury, comic strip characters still play coy. At least the long running debate over the state of little Lizzie’s chastity will finally end. Or will it?

Lord, just hook these two up, run the wedding special, and be done with it already. It’s not like we don’t know they haven’t done it already. Little Francie must know by now where all that headboard knocking is coming from once she's put to bed.

BlatantCommentWhoring™: Is this latest development the other shoe dropping or just more reason to bang the head on the table?