The Odd Couple

Merry Christmas, yall.

Another Update

I went to Supercuts saturday and the girl who cut my hair was none other than the cool girl from years past (see this post). She sat me down, asked what I wanted done, and began to cut. We started in on the same old conversation, but this time we got somewhere. I found out she likes classic rock and that she recently went to Las Vegas to see Roger Waters in concert. And she likes to snowshoe.

When she was done, I paid, gave her a two-dollar tip, and asked her to sign the back of my old free-haircut card, which conveniently I had with me since I brought in the book it is marking in case of a wait. The handwriting matches perfectly the older sign-offs, so I know the last time we met was on 4/5/07 and that only one other person has touched my hair in the meantime.

One more cut till I get a freebie.

I guess my hair must've been reelley long for that second haircut. Or I flirted really well.

Research

I had so much fun researching that last post that I thought I would share some of it with you. It turns out that Clairol.com has a Try It On Studio which you can use to see how you might look with a certain hair color. Here are some of my experiments:

 
 
They also have a "Moxie Meter" that can tell you how sassy you are and how much hair coloring you are likely to be able to stand. I got "Mostly Moxed": "Mmm hmm. You've definitely got a cheeky side, so pluck up the courage to mox out.Think creatively about a new all-over color or get more daring with your highlight colors."

"Mox out"? What does that even mean?

On T-babes (for Zach)

The other night I was at home playing Yahtzee with my family. My sisters each wrote their name at the top of their card with the last name of some hot guy they, uh, admired (question: should it be "Mary Jones" or "Mary Lee Jones"?). Then Jen turned to me to see that I had not added a last name to my card. She asked, "Which girl do you think is hot?"

Let's not go into the ethics of this (neither the objectifying of women by declaring their babe-status on a Yahtzee score card nor the implications of taking a woman's last name); let's just say that we settled on the name "David Pfeiffer." But it got me thinking.¹

It was in this frame of mind that I was walking through Target a few days later when I saw the largest collection of t-babes ever: the hair dye models. Zach-Attach, perhaps we should fall in love with Miss Blonded-by-the-Light or Ms. Spiced Cider. Or, if red is your thing, say hello to Madam Cinnaberry or Lady Auburnin' Hot.

   
As for me, I'll be known as "David Brown-to-be-Wild" in Yahtzee from now on.


¹Okay, actually I have been thinking about it for awhile. Z-Glenn and I were quizzing A-money on the topic of t-babes just a few weeks ago with little success. And over a year ago I was in Europe wondering what it meant that Helen of Troy was the most beautiful woman in the world—is beauty in her case a mythological symbol, a Platonic form, or a cultural standard, a measurable unit?

Gifts

Here are some gifts for you, some things I'd been meaning to share:

The Beatles performing the play-within-a-play from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

A short essay entitled "On the Implausibility of the Death Star's Trash Compactor" by Joshua Tyree (thanks to Pat for finding this online).

The scene in To Kill a Mockingbird where Atticus gives his closing argument at the trial.

Updates

Today I was wandering in the Wilk and stumbled upon a tuba ensemble playing Christmas songs. This was followed by a Dixieland jazz band doing the same.

So, gift-giving is a Christmas tradition, apparently because the wise men brought gifts to the baby Jesus. That seems a little oblique to me, and it begs the question of whether we should pull other traditions from the events surrounding Christ's birth. For example, ought we to go look at babies like the shepherds did? I guess we could all run over to the hospital and stand beatifically outside the nursury. Or, like Joseph, should we make it a season of adoption?

Hang on, there's something in that. I mean, maybe we don't need to all run out and adopt children officially, but lots of people take it upon themselves to "adopt" struggling friends and families and even strangers and make sure they have a good Christmas. Hmmm—can anybody think of any other traditions we might glean from the first Christmas?

In Search of the Christmas Spirit

That's my theme for this December. I'm looking for it, wherever it may be. I'm in Utah currently and have had several conversations with friends about this topic, resulting in several leads:

• Using "Merry Christmas" as a greeting or a goodbye or a thank you.
• uh, Sharing—no, Remembering...no, ummmm

Okay, so I only have one lead that actually begins in a gerund, but that doesn't mean good ideas haven't been shared. E-style pointed out that the Christmas Spirit is really the Spirit, so I guess having one is having the other. And T-sauce and I had a great conversation about the difficulty of pushing the entry-level Christmas sentiment beyond the cookies and snow to giving and goodwill and on through to a recognition and celebration of Christ. I still have questions concerning hypocrisy and growing bored with Christmas songs and the value of quality over quantity, but fear not: I am hot on the trail.

Tonight, Amanda and I made progress by attending the library's viewing of It's a Wonderful Life starring James Stewart and Donna Reed. But this wasn't just any viewing—not just a DVD copy thrown on a white wall. It was on film, projected by a projectionist, complete with cracks and pops and scratches and all that. It was Jimmy Stewart's personal copy of the film, the one he donated along with all his papers to the library back in 1983. So cool.


The film was preceded by a short, made around the same time, called "A Star in the Night." It was a cute recasting of the nativity in the California desert, complete with cowboys for wise men, a grumpy Italian innkeeper, a dude named Jose Santos and his wife Maria, and a huge light-up star bought second-hand from an old theatre.