It has now been one year since my last haircut. I have to admit, I was hoping to have gotten a bit more length by now; but it has grown out quite a lot. I've posted a larger version of my userpic so you can compare the "before" and "after".










It's still not quite long enough to tie back yet. I'm looking forward to that day, because having it always falling into my eyes is a pain. I've never been very fond of hats, but these days I wear a baseball cap whenever I go out in order to control it. I bought some hair clips, but was disappointed to find that I don't yet have enough hair for them to really grip the way they should. Ah, well. Someday.

Today's date is a palindrome, depending on how you write it. Written Month/Day/2 digit Year, today is 01/11/10. We've been having a lot of these since we got into low number years. What's even more fun about this one is that we'll have it again later this year. When the date is written Day/Month/2 digit Year, this same arrangement will also be seen for the 1st of November, 2010. That doesn't happen very often.

I guess I have a soft spot for palindromic dates since I was hatched on one, 06/11/60.

!Enjoy the dayad eht yojnE!

Here's my hair after 11 months of growing. I'm pleased with how much length I've achieved.










It's still in that annoying stage where it's always in my eyes; but I'm getting used to wearing hats. On the other hand, I can now do a much more convincing sheepdog impression.

As those of you who know us are aware, my man is a beef man. Born and raised in cattle country, he grew up with 3000 head in the back yard. So for Christmas dinner this year I thought I'd do something a bit extravagant. We went to a great local market near us called Marczyk's , one of those few remaining that still has real butchers, and got a whole beef tenderloin. The butcher trimmed it very well and tied it up as a roast for me. I knew that top-quality hand-cut dry aged beef was going to be expensive. I still was taken somewhat aback when I saw the label on the package.



I have to admit to having been a bit nervous about cooking it. This was the most expensive piece of beef I had ever attempted to roast.

I turned to the Internet for advice about this type of roast. The various approaches I came across were often, to my mind, appalling. Chefs suggested coating it with crushed peppercorns, coarse ground mustard, and just about every spice and herb you could name. Wrapping it in bacon was a popular method. And many chefs advised cutting little slits in the roast and stuffing a whole garlic clove in each one. Someone else said to impale the meat with woody stems of rosemary; a treatment that left the poor roast looking like a low-budget reenactment of The Martyrdom of St Sebastian, although perhaps a bit more fragrant. Now call me crazy, but I fail to see why one would want to spend $30/pound for a fabulous piece of beef and not be able to taste the beef for all the black pepper, garlic, horseradish, bacon, mustard, etc. You might need that with a cheaper cut, but I really don't think tenderloin needs it. I just rubbed the outside with a bit of olive oil and sprinkled on some salt. It roasted in an open pan on a rack at 375 for about 90 minutes.

Another thing those of you who know Van will know about him is he likes his meat well done. Really, well done. No trace of pink at all. Once again, the chefs all seem to think that tenderloin should be served bleeding. Even the guidelines from the National Beef Council, (the "Beef! It's What's For Dinner!" people), only listed rare and medium rare as possible temperatures for tenderloin roasts. But something else Van is constantly having to remind restaurant waiters and chefs is that if you have a good quality piece of beef you can cook it well done and it will still be tender. So I cooked my roast way past the point most experts would have considered it burnt beyond all recognition; and guess what? It was one of the most tender, moist roasts I've ever tasted, if I do say so myself. It was not dry, since I had basted it frequently. You could cut it with the side of your fork. And the flavor was amazing. The rich, complex flavors developed by the dry aging really showed through.


The half of the roast we ate. The other half is for leftovers.

So in the end, nothing to fret about. Really good meat, treated respectfully but simply, can't help but make a wonderful dish. I can't say when we'll do something this extravagant again, but it was fun, and a memorable Christmas dinner.

On December 4th it's been 10 months since my last hair cut. It's now long enough that it has started to naturally part in the middle, but not yet long enough that I can tie it back to keep it out of my eyes. I think it will take several more months to get to that length.

Thank you to everyone who sent me birthday greetings. I'm sorry that I haven't responded to everyone. I had a nice birthday, but the very next afternoon I got hit by a nasty bug. I'm sure it wasn't H1N1, but it may have been the ordinary seasonal flu. It sure did a number on me, and today is the first day I've felt like sitting in front of the computer much. I'm about 80% today and getting better. Thanks again for the good wishes everyone.

Here is my hair at nine months since it was last cut.








It's still going slower than I would like, but I'm starting to really notice the difference now. I can feel my hair brushing against the back of my neck. It's been years since I've felt that sensation and I have to say I like it.

I think I'm about to enter a new phase. I believe I'm at the start of the "Romantic Poet" length. I can start flouncing about in open-necked ruffled shirts, sighing deeply and writing odes to birds and crockery. The only problem I see is that I'm a bit too...shall we say, substantial for a Romantic Poet. At my size I have trouble pulling off the drawn, consumptive look they favored; usually achieved by TB and/or syphilis and opiate use. I'm just not ready to go to those extremes.

Here's an extra. Van caught me fresh out of the shower, with nothing combed or brushed. It's kinda scary.

This morning the LCROSS lunar impact mission ended with what appears to have been a flawless achievement of it's objectives. It's to be hoped that as the data are analyzed in the coming days and weeks we will learn more about a little explored part of the moon.

Unfortunately, as so often happens these days, the ignorance of the American public and the fear- mongering of the media once again combined in a feedback loop to create a frenzy of hype. Many of the reports about the mission were partly or substantially wrong. In the last few days I have heard phrases such as "Tomorrow NASA will shoot a missile at the moon" [Actually, it was launched almost 3 months ago.] Reports were rife with words such as "smash", "crash" "blast" and in one case I even heard someone use the word "bomb". [LCROSS was not a missile or a bomb. The most it could be called is a projectile.] In the wake of all this sensationalism, it's perhaps not surprising that many people got the wrong idea. This morning on ABC someone said "Many people have tweeted us asking if this impact will harm the moon." [Of course not. LCROSS is far from the first spacecraft to impact the moon. We've been shooting things at the moon since 1959, and the Japanese KAGUYA craft went down just last June. And tons of natural objects hit the moon all the time.]

The LCROSS mission was dedicated to the memory of Walter Cronkite, the man who for many was the face of lunar exploration during the Apollo days. While I'm sure he would be flattered, I have to also think that he would be dismayed by the poor quality of reporting about the mission and the descent into hyperbole and sensationalism by his colleagues in the media today.

Here are some photos of my hair eight months since it was cut.








I thought I'd try parting in the center.



[Sorry for the goofy facial expressions. Van was making me laugh.]

I also made a headband to keep it out of my eyes, but I think it might look a bit too "60's".

For anyone interested, here are the latest photos of my hair, now seven months out from its last cutting. It is now officially at that "annoying" stage . . . it's now long enough to get into my eyes.










And because someone asked to see what it would look like, parted in the middle:



Looks like it will still be a few more months before I can tie it back.

I've been thinking about travel a lot this week. One year ago today we were in South America, and three months ago we were in Alaska. In 12 months we crossed the Equator, both Tropics and got within 120 miles of the Arctic Circle. That's not bad for one year.

It made me wonder just what the farthest points are that we have reached. So, with the help of trip diaries and Google Earth, I looked them up.

Northern Most: 64° 50' 37.87" N 147° 43' 28.30" W Fairbanks, Alaska

Southern Most: 46° 36' 48.39" S 168° 21' 25.56" E Bluff, New Zealand

Eastern Most: 56° 48' 2.06" N 41° 51' 45.46" E Palekh, Russia

Western Most: 52° 16' 56.26 N 104° 16' 24.13" E Irkutsk, Russia

[The last one may seem a bit odd, as depending on how you look at it, it could be counted as "East". But we left home traveling west to get there, so I'm counting it as "West".]

So far we have covered all but 63° of the Earth's circumference. It's mostly the bit with India, the Himalayan Countries, and some of China in it at lower latitudes, and the central part of Russia in the North. I hope to close that gap someday by taking the Trans-Siberian for it's whole length.

I've drawn the boundaries on a map:



Doing it this way distorts things a bit. It shows the outside most points, but of course we haven't covered everything inside the box. We have not been to most of Canada, or the Pacific basin; and we've never set foot on Africa, even though it's inside the box. Still, it's quite a lot of area.

We have visited 5 of the 7 continents; North & South America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. That leaves Africa and Antarctica.

Oceans and Seas are a bit more tricky, as the boundaries between one body of water and another are rather arbitrary, as all the World's oceans are really one. We have bathed in the Pacific, the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean, the Southern Ocean, the Caribbean, and the Mediterranean. (Some of the "seas", like the Adriatic and the Ionian and the Libyan Sea are really just regions of the Mediterranean Sea, so I don't know if I should count them separately.)
I'm not really entertaining the idea of swimming in the Arctic Ocean anytime soon.

I'd be interested in hearing where you guys have traveled.

[A few weeks ago I posted something, and the very next day due to a technical glitch all the links stopped working. It's all fixed now, so I'm going to post it again.]

Today we were going through some old things and found this catalog. It doesn't have a date on it, but the postmark on the back says Feb 1970. So, this is what the hip and swinging were wearing 40 years ago. Well, at least in certain parts of LA. I somehow doubt many men in the rest of the country bought any of them. I suspect most of the catalogs, like this one, were ordered by not-yet-out farm boys to look at and dream. These aren't your Granddad's undies. Oh, wait...40 years ago...maybe they *are* your Granddad's undies. Now there's a scary thought.



( Big photos of scary clothes )

For those of you who are following, here are new photos of my hair at six months since it was last cut.

It's starting to get quite shaggy now.



But it combs back nicely when I need it to.




The back is now touching my collar. (Well, when I'm wearing one.)




At this rate, I'm thinking it will take 12 to 18 months before it's really down on my shoulders, and I could think of myself as a true "longhair".

Today we were going through some old things and found this catalog. It doesn't have a date on it, but the postmark on the back says Feb 1970. So, this is what the hip and swinging were wearing 40 years ago. Well, at least in certain parts of LA. I somehow doubt many men in the rest of the country bought any of them. I suspect most of the catalogs, like this one, were ordered by not-yet-out farm boys to look at and dream. These aren't your Granddad's undies. Oh, wait...40 years ago...maybe they *are* your Granddad's undies. Now there's a scary thought.



( Big photos of scary clothes )

Here is my hair after five months of growing. The ears are almost gone. I'm not having too much trouble with it falling into my eyes yet. I am wearing hats more than I have in the past, when I need to keep it under control.

The web pages chronicling our Alaska trip and the World Beard & Moustache Championships are (finally) up and available to view, if you so desire.

You can find it here.

I just saw "My Life in Ruins", the latest film by Nia Vardalos. It's a fun romantic comedy about an American woman in Greece who's life is a mess, and a handsome Greek guy she falls for. The guy is played by Alexis Georgoulis. The first time we see him he is sporting a big bushy beard, (real or not? I'm not sure), and shoulder length hair, and looking like a big bear of a man in rather baggy clothes. I guess he's supposed to look more scary than attractive. Since he's the romantic interest, he transforms over the course of the story. And one guess what is the first change. That's right...the beard goes. Why is it that whenever they want to make a man "acceptable", the first step is to symbolically emasculate him...removing the one thing that ought to be the most sexually attractive thing about him? Why does giving him the face of a 12 year old girl make him a better love object? In this case the clothes also become more tailored and the hair gets tamed, and in the end he looks like any number of Euro fashion magazine cover boys. So far I haven't found any good "before" photos of Alexis with the beard, but if I do I'll post them here.

It's been four months since I decided to let my hair grow out. While it still isn't all that long in real terms, it's now longer than it's been in around 30 years, since I was in high school. Since it's still quite new to me, the feel of it moving around up there is interesting. I'm having to relearn how to shampoo, as the 'slap-dash' method that worked when it was half an inch long doesn't quite work now. And last week I bought the first hair brush I've owned in 30 years. That was an experience in itself. Some of the offerings looked like antennae or parts from a death ray or alien sex toys....or maybe all of the above. I settled on a simple old-fashioned one, wooden handle with natural boar bristles. Even if in the end I decide not to keep my long hair, the journey is proving interesting.

One of the fun things we found on the Alaska trip was a little shop in Ketchikan selling Russian import items. There are lots of these in Alaska, but this one had come up with something different. They had decorated an unused side room to look like the throne room in the Winter Palace in St Petersburg, and have made up a pretty good facsimile of the Tsar's state robes and the Imperial Crown. For a small fee, you can have yourself photographed as The Tsar. Of course, we couldn't pass this up. I think we make rather convincing Romonovs, since we were the only ones who brought our own beards.

Our trip to Alaska was wonderful. Alaska continues to be as stunningly beautiful and awe inspiring as it ever was, despite it being packaged and mass marketed like some sort of cross between a Disneyland ride and a frozen dinner. We had a great time. However, this trip included far more main stream, tourist-type travel than we normally like to do. This brought us uncomfortably close to great masses of "Ugly American Tourist" sorts. I won't go into any particular details, (partly from an effort to block them out of my memory). Suffice it to say that on many occasions over the last three weeks I found myself humming one of my favorite songs by the great Noel Coward, "Why Do The Wrong People Travel?" ( lyrics )

An .mp3 of Mr Coward singing the song.

Even though it's from a 1961 show, the sentiment is just as true today. About the only difference is that "the clicking of Rolieflexes" has been replaced by the much worse sound effects of the modern digital camera.

[An aside - If you haven't already done so, please, PLEASE turn off your camera's sound effects. A camera was never intended to sound like a pinball machine, and it's very disconcerting when trying to enjoy a quite museum or a hushed natural setting to be surrounded by people who all sound like they have just reached a new level on their X-box.]

On the other side of the transaction, the tourism business hasn't been all that wonderful for the towns, either. Tourism is rather like prostitution; they love the money, but hate what they have to do to get it. In response to a steady stream of thousands of visitors a day the towns of SE Alaska have formed a sort of scab of 3 or 4 blocks along the waterfront where the cruise ships dock that consists of excursion operators, jewelry shops, t-shirt shops, and stores selling little cast resin "totem poles" that are unlike anything any native would recognize. (This is probably because they were made in Indonesia. They were made by "natives", just not natives of Alaska.) This zone pretty effectively keep the tourists away from the real town. It's sadly ironic that these people came to see a place, but instead wind up seeing something that's about as authentic as their home town suburban shopping mall. And what's worse is they don't seem to mind, or even notice.