Saturday Grab Bag Housecleaning

Why yes, I changed the look of the blog. Thanks for noticing! It's been long overdue for a while now. Some time in late October I hit yet another blogstone in my 1000th post, which would have been a good time to unveil a new color scheme except for the fact that, in the midst of SPOOKTOBERFEST, I didn't want to jump into the brighter palette. But for NEW-VEMBER, why not?

(There really isn't a theme for the month of November here at the blog, so don't go expecting any more posts about new stuff, necessarily. Maybe a new job? Fingers remain crossed on that one.) +++

Obligatory Toy Story notes: We continue to re-watch and re-watch various installments of the Toy Story trilogy most Saturday nights, as the little guy's special weekly treat. Yesterday I was talking about The Goldbergs, and I mentioned Jeff Garlin's presence in that show as the dad. Jeff Garlin also provides the voice for Buttercup the unicorn in Toy Story 3, which I find inherently amusing.

One thing that always puzzled me about the Toy Story movies is that they got so many famous celebrities to do the voices of the toys, up to and including Michael Keaton as Ken, and yet I could never place the actress who voiced Barbie. Finally I paid attention during the credits after one home viewing and saw the role belonged to Jodi Benson, which only rang a bell vaguely. Last weekend I made a point of Googling her and realized that's the same woman who did the voice (dialogue and singing) for Disney's Little Mermaid. Considering how many times I've seen Little Mermaid alone, and adding in the overdose on the Toy Story movies, I am somewhat mortified that I didn't make the connection on my own.

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I must have covered just about everything I wanted to talk about this week already (Pixar notwithstanding), but at the same time I really wanted to get a post up today, abundance of content or no. I am taking a personal day on Monday, which is Veteran's Day, because my wife is working an extra day on Monday (since veterinary clinics get overbooked with appointments when there's a federal holiday which provides them with free time and no family/travel obligations). There's a vet/vet joke in there somewhere but I'm at a loss as to exactly what it is. In any case, we all know that the odds of me posting on Monday are iffy at best, so this is my attempt to shorten the silence of the long weekend. See you Tuesday at the latest.

Random insight (plus bonus video!)

I'm still watching Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. but I've run out of things to say about it, as the show seems to be spinning its wheels-of-adequacy a bit at the moment. But I did want to spare a moment to comment a little on the show that comes on immediately after S.H.I.E.L.D., The Goldbergs, which my wife and I have slowly but surely gotten sucked into, exactly as the ABC execs planned.

The first time I left the channel unchanged post-S.H.I.E.L.D. as it segued into a Patton Oswalt-narrated opening monologue, I was deeply underwhelmed. I like a good period piece as much as the next geek, arguably even moreso, but I am also the person who panned Ready Player One, the last great big "I Love the '80's!" paean I encountered. But I didn't hate Ready Player One, I just found it disappointing because it brushed greatness but failed to capitalize on its own potential. To sum up the 9000 words I linked to above: Ready Player One made a bunch of '80's pop culture references with no examination or explanation of what they meant or how they connected. That bugged me. In the same vein, the first voiceover of The Goldbergs I ever heard went approximately like this: "It was the 1980's, the era of E.T., Mr. T. and MTV ..."

Gah. No. Gah. Please. Stop. Gah gah gah.

Do E.T. and Mr. T. and MTV have anything in commmon besides the letter T and being things that were created in the '80's? Well, maybe they do and maybe they don't, but the narration had no time for such trivialities, which just struck me as the worst kind of dumb, lazy writing. I know, I know, I'm taking my own personal peeve way too seriously here, it was just a throwaway bit of cutesy rhyming wordplay and entirely beside the point from the slightly skewed family sitcom that is the essence of the show. But when something rankles, it rankles.

I wanted to like The Goldbergs, though, partly because of Patton Oswalt's involvement and also because of Wendi McLendon-Covey, who plays the mom. I always thought she was hilarious as Clementine Johnson on Reno 911!, so I was rooting for her. My wife was much more charmed by The Goldbergs than I was at the outset, though in her case it was primarily because of Jeff Garlin as the dad (we've discovered this fall tv season that my wife is really, really amused by big fat older male characters who yell a lot, so there you go). And since my wife very sweetly sits through all those episodes of S.H.I.E.L.D. with me (and maybe more to the point is on board with cracking the whip on the kids at bedtime to make sure they're down by 8 so we don't miss a minute of S.H.I.E.L.D.), I could certainly defer to her and keep giving The Goldbergs a chance.

So I did, and I have to say, the show is capable of making '80's references with some depth beyond "Hey! Stuff happened 30 years ago which was superficially different from stuff that happens now! Remember?!?!?" The Halloween episode saw the older son in the family not only dressing up like the Incredible Hulk (which, admittedly, makes for a hilarious visual gag with him all bodypainted green) but actually identifying with the character's loneliness, frustration, discomfort in his own changing body, &c. Granted, the episode started with the kid watching the Incredible Hulk tv show, where Lou Ferrigno as the Hulk never spoke any dialogue, and for the rest of the episode the older son would talk in character as Hulk by speaking in the third person ("Hulk go get some chips!"), which is more true to the comics and/or cartoons, but I am much more forgiving of those slight inconsistencies if the reference is being deployed meaningfully rather than mindlessly. It's winning me over.

And if I've gone from unimpressed to moderately in favor of the show, my wife has gone from mildly interested to completely smitten. And that's almost entirely due to McLendon-Covey. This week I was downstairs in the kitchen cleaning up after S.H.I.E.L.D. ended, while my wife stayed upstairs rocking the baby and watching The Goldbergs. When the episode ended my wife put the baby in his crib and ran downstairs to tell me what I had missed. The A-story was about the older son getting his driver's license and the mom freaking out. My wife, still giggling helplessly, related to me some of the more choice monologues delivered by McLendon-Covey in her epic meltdown, culminating in calling police and hospitals looking for her son because he hasn't called to say he arrived safely. Apparently the mom provides a physical description of her son, whom she adores, and concludes with a sighing "Oh, he was the most beautiful baby!" This tickled my wife almost beyond belief, and with tears of laughter in her eyes my wife said to me "Oh my gosh, she's me, isn't she?"

I couldn't argue the point, nor would I particularly want to. My wife loves our kids uncontrollably, and we both already know that she will suffer acutely from forever seeing them as infants even as they become tweens, teens, doctoral candidates, United States Senators, and so on. She thinks the sun rises and sets on them, that they are the pinnacle of the human race's advancement, and she frets over them inconsolably and beyond reason when they are out of her sight. The only difference between my wife and Beverly Goldberg (other than one being a real person I know and one being a semi-fictionalized representation of someone I don't) is that my wife has enough self-awareness to struggle with and successfully restrain her tendency to smotheringly over-protect our brood, whereas sitcom moms are blissfully unencumbered by same.

At any rate, I love my wife for being so invested in our sons and daughter, and I love her for her self-awareness, and I love her for her sense of humor. The Goldbergs probably gets a lifetime pass for hitting so close to home in such a funny way. When something strikes a chord, it strikes a chord.

As a parting gift, here is my absolute all-time favorite Clementine Johnson clip:

Creepmas is coming (it’s already here!)

We’re a week out from Halloween, so I may as well give a postmortem, huh? The trick-or-treating went well enough; I’m always slightly concerned that some of the houses in my buddy’s neighborhood which go all-out with at least PG-13 levels of frights for the kiddies will be nightmare fuel for my children, but they seem to take it in stride. We went out and about with a group of five dads and seven kids, my little guy and little girl (baby was back at home base with his mom) by far the youngest of the bunch. The little girl was quickly adopted by two of the older girls, who took immeasurable delight in holding the little girl’s hands, one on each side, and gently guiding her from door to door. I’m pretty sure my daughter had close to zero idea what was going on in terms of the whole costumes and candy ritual, but she loved the attention from the bigger kids. The non-hand-holding older children spent most of their time running ahead to the next house and then waiting for the little ones to catch up and the dads to bring up the rear. This left my little guy in a position where no one was really hanging out with him, but if that bothered him in the slightest he did not let on. He was dressed as Buzz Lightyear, he was suitably impressed with the spooky ambiance of the decked-out neighborhood by night, and he was perfectly content ascending and descending driveway after driveway on his own, occasionally checking in with me to tell me some riveting tale of what had happened at the last door. He had a great time.

And this notwithstanding the fact that, due to my own poor planning, certain elements of the evening were almost totally derailed. It wasn’t until the night before All Hallow’s Eve that my wife and I realized we hadn’t located the kids’ trick-or-treat baskets from the year before. I promised my wife I would look for them in the morning, but that proved to be of no avail. So I then promised to buy some candy receptacles at the closest drugstore to my office during the day. However, said drug store was out of such necessities (if they had ever had them to begin with; the seasonal Halloween aisle was pretty trashed). Undaunted, I resolved to stop by the grocery store between the train station and home, and I managed the stop but once again did not find the objects I was seeking. That fruitless sidetrip, however, threw off my entire schedule for the evening by about fifteen minutes, so our departure for my buddy’s neighborhood was delayed, and we hit traffic, and we barely had time to eat any dinner before it was time to trick-or treat (though of course, as expected, my kids were too excited to eat more than a bite, anyway).

And since I had no trick-or-treat bags, buckets, or baskets for my kids, how were they supposed to hoard candy? I went old school and grabbed a couple of pillowcases out of the linen closet; I even made a stab at aesthetic cohesion by grabbing a white one for Buzz the Space Ranger and a brown one for Jessie the cowgirl (since we don’t have any red ones). This makeshift solution was greeted with what I thought was a surprising amount of nostalgic positivity by my fellow parents at the event (despite the fact that none of them had waited until the last minute and all of their kids had plastic pumpkins or proper decorated bags). However, my brilliance was severely undercut by the fact that I had forgotten just how short my five-year-old and two-year-old are; at three or three and a half feet tall, when you carry around a full-sized pillowcase by one end, the other end drags on the ground. And of course it rained just enough on Halloween for the pillowcases to get good and puddle-dampened, with one of them (the white one, of course) containing a spilled packet of M&Ms which had their candy shells dissolve into colorful stains.

All in good fun, though, right? But as annoying as it was to not be able to find Halloween provisions on Halloween itself, just-as-if-not-more annoying was the fact that the shelf space which could have gone to trick-or-treat paraphernalia was full of Christmas stock. Don’t get me wrong, I love Christmas deeply and abidingly, and as of November 1st I’m more than happy to watch Christmas episodes of tv shows and start thinking about what gifts I’m going to get everybody in my family. But Halloween falls on the other side of that line, and it bugs me when the line doesn’t hold.

In my recent wanderings around teh interwebs I encountered the term “Creepmas” in reference to this phenomenon. Now there, my friends, is a great made-up word with multiple layers of meaning, incorporating both the tendency of the yuletide season to creep further and further beyond its traditional December boundaries, as well as the acknowledgment that it’s one thing when Thanksgiving gets overrun, since they’re both family-oriented quasi-religious feast days, but when the samhain celebration of freaks and creeps gets swallowed up, that’s a haunted bridge too far. Some people have taken their umbrage to the point where they not only hold the line but push back, and blog all through December about the scarier side of Noel: A Christmas Carol, The Nightmare Before Christmas, Krampus, &c. I’m not planning on participating myself, for what it’s worth (though I am a big old Krampus fan), but I approve the spirit of the thing.

Also, my wife informed me today that she saw the first Christmas wreath hung in a public space, so man, it is on.

Justifying Lois

I’ve made some incremental progress on my intake of the final season of Smallville, which as it happens has been just enough to notice an interesting phenomenon in the storytelling approach. You may recall that the last time I mentioned my obsessive relationship with the show I invoked Stockholm syndrome to describe how happy I was that the narrative had reached the point where Clark and Lois officially became a real couple, underscored by Clark deliberately revealing his secret identity to Lois.

This may not be readily apparent to those of you who know Superman more as an instantly recognizable American icon and less as a character in an ongoing storyline with twists and turns that have been cataloged over the past 75 years, but here are some things to keep in mind. Lois Lane is an inseparable, indispensable part of the Superman canon, and has been basically since day one. The Fleischer cartoons, the radio serials, the television program, every Hollywood movie, Lois Lane is always in the mix. At the outset, there was a legitimate tension in the love triangle between milquetoast Clark Kent, godly Superman, and the woman who was a disdainful co-worker of the former and ardent admirer of the latter. But after ten or twenty years, the idea had become deeply entrenched that the romantic complications between Superman and Lois could never be resolved, and Superman had to keep Lois at arm’s length for her own safety. The notion became something of a high-concept meta-joke at DC Comics, where they would occasionally publish a story in which Superman and Lois were able to couple up, only to show that it ended in a different disaster every time (with the story subsequently wiped off the books as only a dream or something).

Oh trust me you are going to want to click to Superman-size this.

And that image - Lois dressed like Jackie O, pining for Superman, while bespectacled-and-fedoraed Clark Kent breaks the fourth wall and winks at the audience - is how a lot of people probably think of the characters even today, even though things in the comics (and other sources) underwent a radical shift in the 80’s and 90’s. Clark told Lois he was Superman and they eventually married in 1996, both in the comics (which are arguably the true home of Superman stories) and in the current tv series of the time, Lois and Clark. The tv show didn’t last much longer, but Clark Kent and Lois Lane-Kent, spouses and co-workers, was the status quo in the comics thereafter.

Smallville debuted about five years later, and there had been no backsliding in the comics in the mean time. Smallville was of course designed to be a teen soap, so marriage wasn’t really on the agenda the way that unrequited crushes and such were. And of course the show was about a highschool-aged Clark Kent and his family and friends, so the romantic lead was Lana Lang. Still, the character of Lois Lane was brought into the Smallville story in season four. First she and Clark were foils for each other, then friends, as Lana was gradually written out of the show. Then they were flirtatious friends, and Clark wrestled with whether or not he could trust her with his secret identity and/or expose her to the risk of being in the inner circle of his double life. (You know, all the stuff from the comics, condense. Though it didn’t feel particularly condensed.) Then FINALLY they got together.

Or, it feels more right to say, ended up together. That’s always been the difficult push-pull at the heart of Smallville, the sense that a lot of the overarching mega-story is pre-ordained. (The fact that various characters on the show throw around words like “destiny” at will doesn’t help.) I’ve had the odd argument here and there with fellow comics geeks about the merits of Smallville, and I’ve heard people dismiss it for getting things wrong, which I counter is only a valid criticism if the show is supposed to be a direct prequel, the adventures of the Superman we know and love (and yet there are a few dozen versions of the character who could claim that position, none more “right” than the other) back when he was a teen/young man. But whatever Smallville is, it’s not that (I argue), because Smallville doesn’t take place in the past, it takes place now, just as Superman’s comic/movie/whathaveyou adventures tend to take place now. So it’s not a prequel, it’s just a story, deeply indebted to the Superman mythos. And if that seems like splitting hairs, maybe it is, especially considering that Smallville has always carried itself with a certain sense of “we all know where this is headed.” Things might not happen on the show the way they happened in Action Comics, but the bottomline results would get things where they needed to go. For the many years that Michael Rosenbaum played Lex Luthor as a complex, conflicted frenemy to Clark Kent, his entire performance was heightened by the subtext of what the name “Lex Luthor” is supposed to eventually mean. By the same token, from the first moment Erica Durrance looked at the camera and said, “I’m Lois … Lois Lane,” it was exactly equivalent to saying “I am the one Clark ends up married to.”

And there’s nothing wrong with that, I hasten to add. I can’t believe they made it three whole seasons without Lois. She’s a fantastic character and, amazingly enough, she’s always been a fantastic character. Even in the 1930’s she was tough, brave, resourceful, a respected professional woman; narratively she often had to play the part of damsel in distress but she never felt like a stereotypical damsel. When DC Comics allowed the decade-spanning romance to progress to something more real (caveat: whatever that means inside the logic of comic books) it didn’t feel like a sales-spike stunt, it felt right.

So, in 2010 Smallville brought things between Clark and Lois in line with where they were meant to be. Again, this is almost 15 years after the very special wedding issue of Superman, and as the culmination of about five or six years of build-up within the universe of the show. And yet, the next few episodes of Smallville immediately after the Big Symbolic Kiss that seals the two characters’ fates together, what hoops have the romantic subplot had to jump through?

Proving that Clark and Lois belong together.

But they're both so pretty what more proof do you NEED?

It strikes me as superlatively strange, as if the showrunners felt their number one priority needed to be addressing the concerns of a very specific set of fans, namely the ones who would not want to see Lois and Clark live happily ever after. That group might be further broken up into subsets. One subset might be those who buy into the 50’s Superman who can never marry anyone because the risk is too great. So there’s a lot of attention paid to how ,firstly, Lois can take care of herself (coming through with a rescue even if Clark temporarily loses his powers), and second, how Clark needs Lois for emotional support, because being physically invulnerable isn’t enough to make the mental toll of being Superman bearable on his own. Another subset in the anti-Lois camp might be those who think a superpowered Kryptonian should be mated up with Wonder Woman or some other bulletproof member of the capes-and-tights set. I actually kind of love that in order to address this the showrunners returned to Smallville’s version of Aquaman, had him show up married to a fellow Atlantean (which to be fair is totally accurate to the comics, too), and then had Mera (the Atlantean bride) basically spell it out for Lois that humans belong with humans and supers belong with supers and ne'er the twain shall meet. Also to the show’s credit, it wasn’t as though Lois brooded on this until Clark said he didn’t believe it; Lois had the wherewithal to reject the notion herself.

But still, I have to ask, was any of this necessary? Putting Clark and Lois on equal romantic footing is far from groundbreaking storytelling, and the precedents had been in place in the show and the source comics for ages. Why get so defensive about it, over the course of multiple episodes? I can sort of see how, without this probing at the viability of the relationship, the show would be at a loss for its staple diet of melodramatic angst. Season ten is more or less a victory lap for Smallville to tie up any and all loose ends before the proper, well-planned-in-advance series finale. Clark is finally out from under the shadows of his various fathers and father-figures (Jonathan Kent, Jor-El, the Luthors) and all of his supporting cast have either moved on or found closure in their own ways. There’s a ridiculous amount of plot machinations going on as well (which I am just now realizing is also probably covering up for the dearth of standard soap-y elements): there’s a clone of Lex Luthor rapidly aging toward adulthood, there’s extraterrestrial embodiments of pure cosmic evil preparing to conquer earth, and there’s a shadow war being conducted between government agencies that want to control superhumans and rogue superhumans who want to answer to no one. Either large chunks of all that are going to be dropped or truncated, or the back half of the season is going to be totally bonkers. But either way I hope that from here on out that the show trusts the audience to accept Lois and Clark as a couple, and no longer feels the need to engage in rhetorical contortions to argue away objections that no one in particular is voicing.

V for Vote-detta

Today is Election Day here in the Commonwealth of Virginia, with candidates for governor and lieutenant governor and attorney general on the ballot. It is also, coincidentally, Guy Fawkes Day. Yes, you could argue that Guy Fawkes Day is not "a thing" here in the U.S. of A., just like there's no voting today over in Merrye Olde Englande, but I'm aware of both, and I'm amused.

I did my civic duty this morning, by which I mean I voted, not that I conspired to blow up any legislative chambers by way of treasonous gunpowder plots. Since Virginia has recently become a battleground state and the governor's race was seen as something of a bellweather, this particular election season was wearying. And I say that purely from a passive position, avowing that I got thoroughly worn out hanging up on issues surveys and robopitches, flipping away from political ads on tv, and hiding from canvassers roaming the neighborhoods. It's very easy to bemoan the nasty, cynical nature of the whole democratic process (as perpetrated by both parties, to be sure) but I suppose I should take it as some consolation that we still have a democratic process, however flawed, rather than open violent conflict. Individuals advocating the violent overthrow of the government are still seen as fringe-dwelling wackos by the vast majority of the rest of us, thankfully.

In short, you couldn't pay me enough money to run for office in this country but I do love the country and I'm grateful that there are people willing to go through the ordeal of running for office (and governing thereafter) and providing me the opportunity of feeling engaged by tapping on a touchscreen for a few seconds on a Tuesday. Truly, it's all part of what makes America great.

No reciprocal knowledge

I literally just got off the phone with someone from the IT department at my gig, who was looking to get some information on the portfolio of web applications for which I am responsible. I don’t consider providing such information to be an onerous extension of my nominal duties as webmaster, so I was perfectly happy to talk to the guy. In fact, when he mentioned that part of the purpose of his call was to establish certain baseline info before subjecting those sites to a routine security assessment, I figured I’d throw him a bone and let him have some potentially helpful info: one of the applications in the portfolio, the one which was the center of my Big Annoying Project and was moved from the unclassified to the classified network, had just been through a security assessment as part of the whole battery of internal processes which comprised the bulk of the Big Annoying Project. (I did not call it the Big Annoying Project to the guy on the phone.) My point being, maybe the site did not need another assessment already, maybe the previous one would suffice for whatever box the guy needed to tick on his tasker list.

Honestly, it should not have come as a surprise to me when the guy responded immediately by asking if I could forward the security assessment results to him. Again, just to clarify the situation here: the guy from the IT department informed me that my application needs a security review, I point out to him that the review has already been done by his department fairly recently, and rather than use his own departmental resources to access those review results, he asks me to provide the results. I know he, personally, did not perform the assessment but still, this seems like the worst kind of left hand not knowing what the right is doing, and I get to be the weird middle/third hand.

You guys, this is what I’m talking about when I say my current job has certain shortcomings. I grow wearier and wearier of being the tech person on a contract where the overarching tech support is more like a kind of institutionalized tech denial. I think on some primal monolithic level the DoD wishes that computers had never entered the office space at all and everything was still done via phonecalls and typewritten carbon copies. Since that’s not going to happen, they simply devote huge reserves of technical resources to making the internal computer networks, and all the business processes that come in contact with them, as cumbersome and limited as possible. If it gets to the point where IT performs security assessments and the results are either immediately discarded or tracked in such an impenetrably arcane way that it’s actually easier to ask the customer for their copy than to backtrack to the source, then everything wobbles on the precipice of madness.

I would really like to work someplace where everyone is reading from the same playbook and playing the same game for the same team. I understand there are some places out there which match that description! Now I just need to go out and find them and make an appealing pitch for myself and my services.

Pogonotrophy

Today is the first day of Movember, which is a fairly recent phenomenon which I am both in favor of (as a good cause - not the most important one on Earth, but good) and amused by (because I love a good portmanteau) but which I note in passing as a non-participant, because I already am moustachioed. I also have a goatee, and as probably goes without saying I am one of those nomenclature sticklers who will tell you that the mustache is the hair above my upper lip and the goatee is the hair on my chin and the whole connected mouth-encircling facial hair apparatus is technically called a vandyke (or a French cut, but that is terrible).

But yeah, I grew out my facial hair the summer between sophomore and junior year in college and when I got back to campus in the fall there was nearly unanimous acclamation that it was the correct look for me, not just one viable option but really the only, inevitable choice. It was nice, as I was about to turn 20, to have something distract from my chubby apple cheeks so that I no longer looked approximately 12. When I graduated, some of my friends who held the decidedly minority viewpoint that I looked better clean-shaven (they were of course all girls) persuaded me to scrape off the vandyke, but it came back soon enough and has been a more or less permanent fixture ever since. People still in my life now who have ever known me not to have this look are few and far between.

My dad had a mustache from some time in college until I was about 13 or so, and then he shaved it off and never went back. This may or may not have had something to do with the birth of my Very Little Bro, and/or an incipient mid-life crisis as dad hit his late 30’s. Whatever precipitated it, my dad got so many “You look great, so much younger!” responses that the never-going-back was a no-brainer for him. His childhood best friend, who had also had a mustache for about as long (and who is, just to keep your dramatis personae straight, the commissioner of the NFL Pickem Pool I am muddling my way through once again) was inspired by my father’s rejuvenation to shave his own mustache, but quickly grew it back due to a major miscalculation: his own wife had never seen him without his mustache before, decided she didn’t like him without it, and literally wouldn’t speak to him until he regrew it. She convinced their two sons to get on her side, too. Poor guy never had a chance.

My brothers are both much fairer than I am and although they’ve both experimented with facial hair growth I don’t think either of them has ever gotten past the still-letting-it-grow-out phase before going back to smooth cheeks. Very Little Bro is in fact going through that phase right now (or was, as of three weeks ago when last I saw him), and admitted that ever since he took a job promotion to a managerial position that he’s been trying anything he can think of to look older, and thus right for the role. I wished him luck on all counts.

At that same family wedding get-together, one of the first things my Little Bro said to me when he arrived was that my hair was getting long. He meant on top of my head, not on my chin (I think), though he probably was right on both counts. I still thought this was odd, however, because while my hair might be a bit messy right now it’s certainly on the short side of the spectrum if you consider the varying lengths I’ve worn it at over the years. And again, sometimes I feel kind of old realizing that many of the people who know me now never knew me during those college years when I never cut my hair and it touched my shoulders. These would be the same people who look at me, with my responsible adult professional haircut, and look at my wife, who employs not insignificant effort to tame her own mane, and look at our daughter’s adorably age-appropriate golden ringlets and ask us “Where does she get her curly hair from?” The answer is “both of her parents” though as self-evident as that seems to us, it’s hardly obvious from what we present to the world.

BUT! My Little Bro certainly is on the shortlist of people who knew me well enough when I had the hippie-Jesus look working, which is why I found it so disconcerting for him to deem my trim-needing coif “long”. If so much time has passed since I was a long-hair that my own siblings are kind of starting to forget about it, I really am getting old.