Beard Science

I'm normally a clean-shaven fellow. I also don't really like to wear hats,or sunglasses, but that's beside the point. This post is about facial hair. As I previously stated, most days out of the year I don't have any facial hair, but whenever I go up to our family cabin (which is usually once a year), I grow out my beard.

Not shaving while in the woods for about a week allows me to get past the awkward, drunk hobo look and return to the public with decent growth. I usually keep the beard until it gets annoyingly itchy, or until I have to start to trim and maintain it, which is also annoying. Having a beard gives me a chance to try a different look and hide my double chin. Plus, my wife likes me with facial hair, so that's a bonus. Although she called this last beard "distinguished," which means there's gray in it and I'm getting old.

However, every beard's life must come to an end in my house. And when that time comes, I don't quite know how to deal with it. Just shaving it off seems so unceremonious and anti-climatic. In the past I've shaved it off in parts and sported a goatee, an extended mustache and mutton chops for an evening. I should have been thinking bigger. I should have been thinking more grandiose. I should have been more creative, like Ben Garvin and his beard:



Now THAT'S how you shave a beard off! Well done, Mr. Garvin.

It's Electric -- Boogie Woogie Woogie!

Live theater is fighting an uphill battle, faithful readers. In a world of special effects, computer-generated imagery and digital 3D, the standard live performance suffers from a lack of pizazz. Although, if you think about it, you can't get much more three-dimensional than watching a live performance.

The producers of live performances are so desperate to pull people's eyes away from the likes of Michael Bay and Jerry Bruckheimerdinger that they're willing to risk their actors' well-being with shows like Spider-Man: Turn Off the Lights, So There's More Risk Involved. But even that's not enough to get crowds into the theaters to see the performances. So some people in Belfast, Ireland, decided to take their spectacular live show to the crowds instead.

Take a look:



I think that every kid who has seen Return of the Jedi has dreamed of a day when he or she could shoot lightning from his or fingertips. Sure, Emperor Palpatine is a bad guy, but that's still a pretty cool power. And this kind of technology gets us one step closer to Palpatine lightning fingers, which, in turn, puts us one step closer to lightsabers -- and that is always a good thing.

The City So Nice, They Made It Twice

I used to be a great road tripper. In the past, I've taken a couple of extended road trips with my brothers, my father and my friends, and we always prided ourselves on making great time, finding new places to eat and making as few stops as possible.

This is no longer the case.

Much like my waist size, my road trip time has expanded and become more unpleasant since I had children. What used to be a four-hour trip to our family cabin now takes approximately 24,601 hours, or so it feels. If only I could make an exact replica of our vacation destination and put it only 22 minutes (the length of one Phineas and Ferb episode) away from our home. But that's crazy talk, isn't it? No one in their right mind would clone an entire city, right?

Right?



Huh. Go figure. Of all the popular cities out there, I wouldn't have guessed that Hallstatt, Austria was a town that merited cloning. Perhaps Hallstatt (Part Deux) in the Huizhou, Guangdong province is just the beginning, or testing ground for the clone city concept. If the experiment goes well, perhaps there will be more clones, like a Paris in Idaho, or a London in Ohio, or maybe even a Hell in Michigan.

Which begs the question, faithful readers, if you could clone any city and move it to a location closer to where you are now, which would it be? And why? And would it have the same charm?

For now, though, I guess when in China, do as the Austrians do.

Heaven is a Place on Earth

Faithful readers, I am currently on vacation. This blog will return to its regularly scheduled (i.e. weekly) posts about unusual, funny and entertaining (to me) things next Monday.

Tchau!