A Great History of Men's Haircuts

Substitute teaching at Manor Middle School.

A kid came up and said in a weak voice, "They said if I might throw up I should go to the office."

Me- "No problem, go ahead."

He turned and started walking toward the door very slowly. All eyes were on him. Was he going to blown He got to the door, turned around just as slowly and asked, "Do I, need a pass?"

Me- "No, just go!"

Jesus Christ, if ever a rule was meant to be broken.

April 26, 2001

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Great news from the NIH National Library if Medicine!

"Our opinion is that the consumption of red wine cannot be a general recommendation for the population, even though epidemiological studies conducted at Cambridge University (UK) indicate that the consumption of two glasses of wine [per day], along with other lifestyle changes, like moderate exercise, taking fruit, and not smoking, increases the life expectancy by 14 years."

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7920262/

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One of the all-time great feats of comedy happened on this day in 2006 - Stephen Colbert roasting then President George W. Bush to his face at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. Oh, such joy. I couldn't believe what I was watching. It's hard to go back psychologically to that moment. There was just nothing like it before. There was so much misinformation, but for only new he was 100% insulated from the criticism of him. 

"I believe the government that governs best is the government that governs least. And by these standards, we have set up a fabulous government in Iraq."

"Now, I know there are some polls out there saying that this man has a 32% approval rating. But guys like us, we don't pay attention to the polls. We know that polls are just a collection of statistics that reflect what people are thinking in "reality." And reality has a well-known liberal bias."

"I stand by this man. I stand by this man, because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things, things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message, that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound with the most powerfully staged photo-ops in the world."

It was glorious. Bush wanted to have him murdered. 

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I've been reminded a lot lately of the George Carlin line, "Think about how stupid the average person is, and then realize that half are even stupider than that." 

Of course all of US are in the top 50%, right??? What about the hundreds of people that called Maryland health centers over the weekend asking if disinfectants could indeed cure covid-19? 30 million of us are in the bottom 10%, and the post below makes me wonder how they are split up by party.

April 26, 2020

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From Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, explaining the long relative peace since World War II: "The Nobel Peace Prize to end all peace prizes should have been given to Robert Oppenheimer and his fellow architects of the atomic bomb. Nuclear weapons have turned war between superpowers into collective suicide, and made it impossible to seek world domination by force of arms."

Huh, that's something I'll have to think about for a couple years. And hopefully in the meantime we don't get incinerated in some nuclear bomb blast, launched by some madman.

April 26, 2019

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“When a man gets to a point in his life when his name’s on the building, he can get an unnatural sense of entitlement.” -Roger Sterling (Mad Man)

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Biden seems like a good safe bet. Seems like he'd win all the battleground states, or at least enough of them. The problem is that safe bets, the ones that seem due, tend to lose- Dole, Gore, McCain, Romney, Clinton.

April 26, 2019

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I had to teach Gretel a valuable lesson tonight- don't laugh at someone who is crying, EVEN IF their face looks funny. (But really, what kind of a saint would you have to be to actually abide by that rule?)

April 26, 2019

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Hey cousins. Did you know we are cousins? We sure are! If you like, send me a message with your parents' or grandparents' names, birthdates and death dates and I'll likely be able to let you know our most recent ancestor. For privacy reasons, it's hard to research living people. If it's more than 15 generations it won't work. If you need help finding them, go to www.findagrave.com. 

Dear Reader, I'm talking to you.

April 26, 2019

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Bill Cosby was convicted of sexual assault on this day in 2018. At the time, I wrote:

Just once it would be nice to see a headline that starts, "Bill Cosby," and ends, "Kills Himself."

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Who knew that Kim Jong Un has the exact same profile as Alfred Hitchcock???

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Remember during the campaign when someone would give Trump crap about the wall and he'd say (to deafening cheers) that it just got 10ft higher? Just crossed my mind that this week it became like 35ft shorter. And to even greater cheers.

April 26, 2017

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Zuzu just destroyed a calculator, and it made a big impact on Gretel. She held the pieces and spoke like she was in a trance- "This is not good. We can not fix this. I'm going to dream about this. I'll take it up to my room. We need to get another blue one."

April 26, 2017

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If any of you are going to Jonathan Demme's funeral, put the lotion in the casket.

(Jonathan Demme died on this day in 2017)

April 26, 2017

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Gretel's stretching at karate. When they do the butterfly stretch the instruction asks where there butterfly is flying. Every time Gretel says, "to the grocery store." This time she switched it up- "to the haunted house party." Haunted house party? That sounds like fun.

April 26, 2017

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From Stephen Pinker's The Blank Slate:

When the biochemist (and radical scientist) George Wald was solicited for a semen sample by William Shockley's sperm bank for Nobel Prize-winning scientists, he replied, “If you want sperm that produces Nobel Prize winners you should be contacting people like my father, a poor immigrant tailor. What have my sperm given the world? Two guitarists!”

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Even stupid people would agree that stupid people are too stupid to know they're stupid. At what point though would they be better off under a benevolent dictator than a democracy? Maybe a better question is- how long would it take for them to murder that benevolent dictator they were too stupid to elect for their own good?

(I think this was from before I heard of the Dunning-Kruger Effect.)

April 26, 2015

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Did you hear about the recent local KKK rally? If those clowns wanted to make an impact they should have joined today's Race Against Racism event in Lancaster. Imagine if they would have won! Oh, the embarrassment for us. We'd have no other choice but to admit that racism was indeed victorious. (Of course we'd need to have a few of our best people planted near the finish line with tripwires and tranquilizer darts, just in case.)

April 26, 2014

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Epitaph Idea: I went to Heaven and all they got me was this lousy tombstone.

April 26, 2011

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On this day in 1865, Union cavalry troopers cornered and shot dead John Wilkes Booth. I'm not a supporter of the death penalty in general, but in cases like this...

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Akira Kurosawa's epic, Seven Samurai, was released on this day in 1954.

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"The Most Dangerous Animal In the World" exhibit debuted on this day in 1963 at the Bronx Zoo. It was a mirror.

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The Chernobyl disaster took place on this day in 1986.

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The French Romantic artist, Delacroix, joined us on this day in 1798. Here's an illustration from Faust.

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Ma Rainey was born on this day in 1886. Here's some advice she gave to Bessie Smith: "Let your soul do the singin'."

That's the same advice that Werner Herzog gave the girl who sang the opening to Even Dwarves Started Small, has the chickens are pecking. The first time I saw that film, I could feel it changing my neural pathways. I remember the distinctive thought that it put me into a strange state of ecstasy. Later I read that that was exactly Herzog's intent. That's some filmmaking!

It's the same reason that Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen are great. Their voices aren't great but their souls do the singin'. 

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Austrian-English philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein, was born on this day in 1889.

From Richard Dawkins' God Delusion- ‘Tell me,’ the great twentieth-century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once asked a friend, ‘why do people always say it was natural for man to assume that the sun went round the Earth rather than that the Earth was rotating?’ His friend replied, ‘Well, obviously because it just looks as though the Sun is going round the Earth.’ Wittgenstein responded, ‘Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?’ I sometimes quote this remark of Wittgenstein in lectures, expecting the audience to laugh. Instead, they seem stunned into silence.

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Baseball player, Hack Wilson, was born on this day in 1900, and passed away 48 years later. He had one of the best all-time seasons, in 1930, and his RBI record of 191 from the season still stands. That is a feat!

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Carol Burnett was born on this day in 1933. What is it about her that makes her so likeable? Apparently she's the one who first said, "Comedy is tragedy, plus time." If that's the case, I guess there will be a time in the future that her death will be absolutely hilarious.

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Duane Eddy joined us on this day in 1938. Still alive at 85. Jim Byron thinks this would be good baseball walk-up music. True!

https://youtu.be/uGPG_Y-_BZI

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Melania Trump was born on this day in 1970. After the election when they left the White House and went back to Florida and got off the plane... I've never seen such body language in my life, that person did not give a FUCK! She was like, I'm outta here. Maybe the only time she cared less about something was when she visited the border during that humanitarian crisis.

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Other notable birthdays- Douglas Sirk (1897), Jean Vigo (1905)

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Lucille Ball left us on this day in 1989. I never thought she was funny. I'm surprised to find though that she didn't think she was funny either.

“I’m not funny. What I am is brave.”

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Country Music superstar, George Jones, left us on this day in 2013

Bob Dylan, if for nothing else, he should be remembered as one of the all-time great disc jockeys. Introducing this song:

“I was looking through my records the other night. Ya know, I have over 70 George Jones Records?! If you look at them all, it gives you a great history of men's haircuts. Here's George in a period of time when he had just grown out his brush cut and had a bit of a mutton chop sideburn look going. From 1962, this is I Heard You Crying In Your Sleep.”

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This day in 1989: the Giants' Kevin Mitchell got crossed up while running for a ball in the outfield and caught it with his bare hand.

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Impeach!

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I held my own at my first cornerball game yesterday. A former employee of the co-op, however, smashed an Amishman in the face and might have broke his nose. Looking back, it all makes sense...

https://youtu.be/YKKvdkXIXIg

April 26, 2009

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Kermit.

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A few things on Brad Pitt playing Dr. Fauci on Saturday Night Live last night.

-That was the most I've laughed at a skit in ages. The premise is perfect- Pitt playing Fauci, listens to actual statements by Trump, is then forced to defend the indefensible.

-The cliche is that someone would want to be played by Brad Pitt, and Fauci joked about it this week. That guarantees Fauci woke up this morning, found out it happened and watched it.

Brad Pitt breaking character and thanking Dr. Fauci for his calm and clarity, serves as all of us thanking him.

-How can it be that genuinely thanking someone for their calm and clarity can be seen as an attack the president? It's because he doesn't meet the most basic requirements of the job.

-When you elect the Tasmanian Devil, you don't look to him for calm and clarity, or intelligence, or humility, or basic decency, or self-reflection, or reason or for any leadership quality. When you vote for the Tasmanian Devil you vote for chaos, and that's what you get. And when you sometimes desperately need order, it sets up these ridiculous, inevitable scenarios.

http://vntyfr.com/aW6LeXD

April 26, 2020

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Here's a headline you don't see every day.

IFLScienceScientists Opened Up A Jar In A Cemetery And Found A Mummified Green Hand Clutching A Copper Coin

https://www.iflscience.com/scientists-opened-up-a-jar-in-a-cemetery-and-found-a-mummified-green-hand-clutching-a-copper-coin-67001

April 26, 2023

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Stanley Kubrick's NY Street Pictures

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There is no red in this picture, it's entirely of light blue, black and white. Somehow our brains is filling in the colour. Zoom in.

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Henry David Thoreau:

“However mean your life is, meet it and live it; do not shun it and call it hard names. It is not so bad as you think. It looks poorest when you are richest. The fault-finder will find faults even in paradise. Love your life, difficult as it is...

You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island of opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land;

there is no other life but this.”

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James Baldwin- “Throw everything out of your mind. Read a little, sleep. The world will still be here when you wake up, and there'll still be everything left to do.”

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Marcus Aurelius- "The most complete revenge is not to imitate the aggressor."

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Tony Soprano- “I'm like King Midas in reverse. Everything I touch turns to shit.”

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Barnes & Noble posted- "Please don’t let anyone book shame you. Reading is personal." 

Some comedic genius responded, "I needed to hear this. Let me read Mein Kampf in peace!" 

Then he made it even funnier. He wrote, "I'm joking, even though this ruins the joke."

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James Garfield- "The truth will set you free, but first it will make you miserable."

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Thomas Paine- "He who dares not offend cannot be honest."

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Tennessee Williams- "Why did I write? Because I found life unsatisfactory."

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Steven Wright- "Woke up this morning and folded my bed back into a couch. Almost broke both my arms cause it’s not that kind of bed."

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John Muir, Our National Parks- Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity."

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Einstein- "Never memorize something that you can look up."

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Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism- "What is meant here by saying that existence precedes essence? It means first of all, man exists, turns up, appears on the scene, and, only afterwards, defines himself. If man, as the existentialist conceives him, is indefinable, it is because at first he is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be."

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Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation- While believing strongly, without evidence, is considered a mark of madness or stupidity in any other area of our lives, faith in God still holds immense prestige in our society. Religion is the one area of our discourse where it is considered noble to pretend to be certain about things no human being could possibly be certain about. It is telling that this aura of nobility extends only to those faiths that still have many subscribers. Anyone caught worshipping Poseidon, even at sea, will be thought insane.

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John Waters- "I always wanted to be a juvenile delinquent but my parents wouldn't let me."