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.

We finished dinner tonight here in Anchorage at about 7:00 pm. After settling the bill, our perky waitress said "You guys have a good night. Enjoy that sunshine!" Sunset tonight will be at 11:09 pm. No wonder Alaskans go a little bit crazy this time of year.

The World Beard & Moustache Championships 2009 was held on Saturday, May 23rd. It was the largest one to date, with over 300 contestants from 13 countries and 18 categories. A new feature this year was the "Parade of Nations", similar to the Olympic Games. There were 3 countries represented for the first time this year, Australia, New Zealand, and Spain.

Here are some photos of the teams. ( View Photos )

I'm afraid it will take me a few days to get more photos posted, as we took many hundreds of them, and I'm on a small laptop and using a flaky hotel WiFi link to upload them. Needless to say, it was a very photogenic evening.

Yesterday, Friday May 22, was the second day of festivities around the WBMC. In the afternoon there was a parade through the streets of downtown Anchorage. With over 250 contestants, and many more bearded attendees, it was quite an event. Then later on that evening was the Alaska Grizzly Beard Contest, a much more light-hearted contest. There was also music by the Australian band "The Beards", who not surprisingly, do original songs about beards and being bearded. It was a fun evening all around.

To see some random photos from the parade, go here

There are some experiences associated with this event that are rare, even unique. One of them is feeling what it's like to be in the majority for a change. With over 250 contestants and many other men also in attendance, bearded men are by far the majority at any of the WBMC functions. The experience of not being the biggest beard in the room is, for me, quite rare. The experience of being not just accepted but genuinely admired for my beardedness, instead of being somewhat of an outcast because of it. The experience of getting an almost overwhelming amount of attention by a big bunch of woofy men, albeit mostly straight ones, is something I could get to like. And at the risk of getting a bit gooey, the experience of sharing something with a large group of men. A bonding. An affirmation of an important facet of ones personality. Something deeper than just all liking the same sports team, but something that's about a part of you. Being with a whole group of guys who understand what it's about, being a bearded man in a mostly shaved world. Understand, and feel it too. Hard to put into words, but wonderful to feel.

A personal highlight of the day, and I hope a moment of opening someone's eyes came at the gathering before the start of the parade. There are several film crews working on documentaries of the WBMC. One young (not bearded) guy was interviewing people about their thoughts about beards. The guy he was interviewing was saying "I took a psychology class, and they said that growing a beard is an act of defiance. Sort of saying 'Fuck you' to the world." The interviewer said, "I'v read that wearing a beard is a sign of trying to hide something." Well, I couldn't let that pass. I stepped up and said, "You've got it all wrong." "This", pointing to my full natural beard, "is how a man's face was meant to look. This is natural and normal. You don't need to be psychoanalysing me to find out what my motivation is for keeping my face as it was intended to be. You need to figure out what the motive is for so many men to cut their beards off." After a moment of stunned silence the interviewer said "I'd never thought of that before." Mission accomplished, I hope.

Yesterday the World Beard & Mustache Championships 2009 got started in Anchorage with a welcome party hosted by the Southcentral Alaska Beard & Mustache Club. They held it at a local rec center and had a barbecue and a brass band. It was not only a fun evening, but it was a rare experience to not have the biggest beard in the room. It seems like the range is much wider this year, with many younger guys taking part, and more men from the US and Canada, and even a team from Australia this time. But the Germans and Swiss were still there in force as usual. I think there's going to be a couple hundred men in total this year. The next event is a parade through downtown Anchorage on Friday afternoon, then a kick off party Friday evening. The contest will be Saturday afternoon and evening.

Here are a few pix from yesterday. I'll post more later.