Get on with it!

combOVER

I know it has been some time since I last wrote a blog entry on this blog (and any other, for that matter) but after a whole term spent in Utrecht I deserved to take a break. (And I didn't have a full access to the Internet until today, which also explains why I haven't been able to look for silly videos to chew on.)

Since last time that guy who decided to have a combover haircut for the sake of a "scientific experiment" put an end to it and gives us his conclusions:

"After I shaved it off completely and walked around bald nobody thought that was remotely interesting: 'Oh, it's just a bald guy. Normal. Easy. No problem.' That's probably the best solution for people who have combovers unless you really love the combover, but I suspect that a lot of people with combovers don't really like their combovers: they're just afraid of accepting baldness, which, I think, is totally unnecessary. Bald can look really great and I think it's worth accepting your baldness unless you truly love your combover, in which case I support you too. (…) Some people are just afraid of the unknown, and the unknown is complete baldness, and let me tell you: it feels good, it's easy to maintain and nobody's gonna be whispering behind your back about how you're being in denial and you're not fooling anyone."

The Combover experiment: an update

Let's take a look at what happened to this fellow who decided to have his hair ruined by a combover for the sake of sociology:

The Combover experiment

A brave (or foolish?) man decided to change his regular hairstyle for a hideous combover in order to see how people would react…

Shame on Him! Sexdecies: Jared Diamond

Today when I visited the (official) germ@namur blog to read a new entry (a report on Jared Diamond's lecture in Namur) I was shocked: how can such an intelligent man (I presume he is, for he was awarded the , Pulitzer Prize Guns, Germs, and Steel in 1998) have a combover? Look at these pieces of troubling evidence:






Besides, he has what I call a "morality teacher beard"…

Just Google

Just like Weird Al Yankovic turned Michael Jackson's Beat It into Eat It,



How to milk a cow, how to cut your own hair…

The picture of the guy that you see when it doesn't play or at the middle of it shows a guy with a mullet, which can simply be defined as on the Wikipedia entry:

"[A] hairstyle that is short in the front, top, and sides, but long in the back."

I think I've already posted this video that I shot myself while watching TV. It features Belgian singer Miam Monster Miam talking about mullets (or 'mitchellis', as we call them in Liège):



I even retrieved the page where he borrowed the pictures: it's just a click away. I recommend you to to take a look on MulletGallore.com: you can find hundreds of pictures featuring people with a mullet.

Today's Uncyclopedia featured articles: the mullet, but also Mr. Clean (a fierce opponent to the mullet…).

Bruce Willis as Mr. Clean in Mr. Clean: The Motion Picture.

Shame on Him! Tredecies: Ehud Olmert

I finally decided to search my memory for someone having a combover I hadn't mentioned yet on this blog. Then the face of Ehud Olmert (Prime Minister of Israel) came to my mind… Look at this piece of evidence:


When I first saw him, after his predecessor Ariel Sharon fell in a coma due to I-don't-know-which illness, I immediately spotted his combover. Of course: that's always what I look on a middle-aged or old man.

But since then, as we can see on the picture below (showing the evolution of his hair), Ehud Olmert was wise enough to cut his combover, making him look less silly than before…


Congratulations, Mr Olmert!

Then I wondered which could have been the reasons that led him to make the good choice. Yesterday, I found this interesting open letter to Ehud Olmert published in January 2006 on the Jerusalem Post:

Dear Mr. Olmert,

Your recent TV appearances, albeit in troubled times, have moved me to write to you on a personal matter that has been troubling me about you for sometime.

I too had the misfortune to lose my hair, as is the way with so many Jewish men. I too chose to artfully comb what remained in an attempt to conceal the fact. There were certain angles from which you could view me (usually if you were sitting and I wasn't) where you genuinely couldn't tell that I had lost my hair – or at least, at my most delusional, I could persuade myself thus.

However, the combover years were not happy ones. Sport in particular gave rise to much awkwardness, as it gave my opponents plenty of ammunition with which to unsettle me. I often rose majestically into the air to head a football, and then faced the anxiety of starting the Bobby Charlton rearrangements even before my feet had hit the ground. [Bobby Charlton was one of the stars of England's 1966 World Cup-winning soccer team, who lost his hair at a young age and resorted to ever-more-elaborate combover arrangements in a ludicrously vain effort to conceal the fact; readers of American origin might wish to substitute, say, Rudy Giuliani.]

A gust of wind was also incredibly unwelcome, unmasking me as it did in front of total strangers.

My anguish was put to an end one afternoon, when a colleague at work put his pencil down and said: "I simply cannot sit here a minute longer with your hair looking like that."

He took me by the hand and sat me down in a barber's shop with the simple but life-transforming instruction to the man in charge - "Take it off."

It was interesting that, phoney as the combover had been, and as much I knew in my heart that it fooled no one, it still took my colleague to force the issue. This took place a dozen years ago, and I have often reflected how deeply I am indebted to my now former colleague; how he released me from such tension and awkwardness.

Mr. Olmert, I would like to perform the same role for you. I simply cannot scream "Take it off!" at the TV screen anymore. Believe me, it is a liberating and life-affirming experience. Unafraid of being unmasked, you will have an immediate spring in your step, a key stress release for any politician.

You are going to need a steady nerve and clear thoughts in the difficult days ahead, and I would never be so arrogant as to suggest which political course you might steer for Israel. But on this issue I do feel qualified to weigh in.

Take my advice. Get rid of the lid, and you will be far better placed to negotiate your way through.

The writer, a committed reader of The Jerusalem Post, is the director of a duty-free business based in London.

What we can conclude from all that is that Rudy Giuliani's combing-out [btw, I've just coined this word as a pun to coming-out] cleared the way for a series of men who come to feel that trying to hide their baldness is not only useless, but also pathetic.

PS. I found an American that's a HUGE combover; I'll write about him very soon… A hint? Let's say that he's was until 2006 high-rank diplomat at the United Nations…

Kingpin

Yesterday the channel BeTV broadcast a film I watch approximately seven years ago: Kingpin. I had really vague memories about it, but I remembered it was really funny—being directed by the Farelli Brothers, with talented actors such as Woody Harrelson, Bill Murray and Randy Quaid. All I knew from the plot was that it was a rivality between two bowling players.

So, we watched that film yesterday. Unfortunately, we discovered from the first lines of dialogue that it was the French-Canadian version! (We knew it not only from the names, pronounced in the American way, but also from the unfamiliar voices—I'm interested in voices, as you know). However, I seized the opportunity to look at the linguistic characteristics of a French-Canadian dubbing. All I can say is that I don't like it at all—and basically that's why both Canadian and French versions normally exist: the way of speaking (and I'm not even talking of pronuncing) is hugely different. French-Canadians accept translations that we would normally ban in France, because they are considered as "false friends" or "deceptive cognates". But on the other hand, and surprisingly enough, Canadians use terms like "abat" where the French would use English words, in this case: strike.

Enough of this.

My point was to tell you about the story and show you a scene from it. Here goes the basic plot (sorry, but it won't seem funny at all in the way I tell it):

Roy Munson (played by Woody Harrelson) had a gift for playing bowling. He practiced this game for years. When he was 21, his father let him go and live his dream of becoming a great bowling champion. Unfortunetely, his road crossed that of Ern Mc Cracken (played by Bill Murray), nicknamed Big Ern, who was a good bowling player, but not already known in that time. The later offered Munson to crook guys in a bowling. Unfortunately, the guys they crooked became mad at them, and Big Ern let the guys beat Munson, while he escaped. The guys put Roy's right hand in the device that brings the bowl back after you've hit the pins, and Roy shouts…

17 years later, Roy Munson has become a complete loser. And "to turn Munson" has become a popular phrase meaning, well, basically, "to become a loser". He has a pair of hooks instead of his right hand (which he can cover with a rubber prostetic hand), he's drinking whisky all the time, lives in a crappy flat whose landlord is an ugly old cow, and—ultimate sign that he's a loser—he's got a combover. One day, he meets Ichmael (Randy Quaid) at the bowling. Ich plays very well. But Ich was not meant to be there: he's an Amish…

After several events, Roy manages to persuade him to enter a big tournament in Reno, with an prize of $1 million offered to the winner. Roy helps Ich getting better at bowling, and they raise money by playing against other players. They finally arrive in Reno. But Big Ern is also present: since Roy's "accident" 17 years sooner, he had become US champion several times, and got very rich.

The day before the tournament, Ich breaks his left hand (that he plays with), and Roy's going to replace him, forced to play with his right rubber hand.

Roy is lucky: he makes it to the finals; his opponent is Big Ern. Here's an extract from that epic match.



As you can see, Big Ern's got a combover, too. And it's even worse than Roy's. Check this out (it's the last aim, determining whether Roy or Ern wins):



Have you seen that?! That's one of the ugliest combovers I've ever seen in the movie history. Ok, it was on purpose… But it definitely shows you how awful it is to have a combover: if a "combovered" person gets excited or walks in the wind, he'll end up his a floating mass of 1 feet long hair trying to escape from the skull!!! If you know someone in your family that's got a combover, show him this video and maybe he'll realize he's out of his mind to have a haircut like that.

And oh yeah, before I go: I've just written that the combover was used on purpose to show this is a silly hairstyle for losers. In Scary Movie 2, the actor David Cross also has a combover, just to make fun of it. But there are films where the combover is the "natural", or usual haircut of the actor. For instance, in Francis Ford Coppola's Godfather, Bonasera, the undertaker whose excellent words ("I believe in America") start the film, has got a combover. And, surprisingly, it changes in the film: one stripe at the beginning, and two later on… Curious, isn't it? And, of course, silly, isn't it?

What A Silly Ass

You know I like to show you pictures with celebrities whose hair was digitally changed. Here's a fine example: the most powerful (and silliest) man in the world with a combover!

He even looks a lot sillier than he is! (And with such a hair, he looks like Chevy Chase…)

And oh yeah, there's another president who's actually got a combover: Mr Bouteflika, president of Algeria, as you can see on this picture…