HAIR.
Hmm. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing. Yet we get in such a state about it.
When I was a lad, my late dad used to say the same thing to me every single day: "Get your hair cut." The writer Martin Amis has reported the same phenomenon in his father. It made us the men we are today: bewildered.
This week, agents of leading nutter Kim Jong-il, popular (or you get killed) leader of North Koreashire, waddled belligerently into a South Ealing hair abattoir to menace the owner about a disrespectful poster.
Said poster depicted Comrade Kim beside the words "Bad hair day?" and an offer of 15% off haircuts throughout April.
True enough, Kim's barnet isn't what you'd expect in a dictator. It's what you'd expect in a young person, which indeed he is, having inherited the family business ("despots since 1948") a bit early. His coiffure often falls into a centre parting, which is unusual among dictators, unless you count Lenin's bald crown as an extremely wide one.
For the record, follicular botanists refer to Kim's barnet as "a floppy top with shaved sides", which makes him sound kinda funky or fun rather than an evil psychopath, ken?
Back at the barber's, the flop-topped poltroon's goons remonstrated with the salon's senior hair economist Mo Nabbach, who told them firmly: "Listen, this isn't North Korea, this is England."
Quite right. It's not as if it's an easy mistake to make. For one thing, Scottish matters receive more accurate and balanced coverage in North Korea. Mo, meanwhile, sent Kim's henchmen homewards tae think again or, indeed, for the first time.
Now, at this juncture I need not point out to educated readers like you that the hair referred to hitherto pertains to the bonce or cranium. But chin-hair has also been much in the news this week, with allegations that beards are "guided by evolution". And, no, they don't mean it's the last part of the ape that we retain.
Follow me closely here, as it's going to get Darwinian. Beards come and go as facial adornments. But, according to scientists in Sydney, Australia, the more they come, the sooner they should go.
That's because of an evolutionary phenomenon called "negative frequency-dependent sexual selection" — I warned you; now we're both lost — or, as no less an authority than the BBC reported, "an advantage to rare traits".
In other words, the more men that have beards, the more attractive it is not to have one. And indeed vice-versa. Male guppies exhibit similar peaks and troughs in their colouring but, as I find the comparison with guppies insulting, we'll move swiftly on. If you must read more about the lesser-bearded guppy, it's in the popular journal Biology Letters, available in no good bookshops.
As if tropical fish weren't enough to be going on with, we were soaked with news that haddock-faced broadcaster Jeremy Paxman will be plashing north to the Embra Festival Fringe in August to give an important lecture on pognophobia. That's right, a fear of pognos.
He's promised that, as well as beard aversion, his oration will tackle the vexed issue of underpants, for which, unless he wears his scanties on his chin, I cannot see a connection.
Paxman's own highly controversial beard was short-lived, as he believed the gravitas it imparted undermined the comedic purpose of Newsnight.
Trustworthy sources might also say that the personally abusive Paxman only grew the beard to draw attention away from his bandy legs. However, as I have no trustworthy sources, I cannot comment on that. Indeed, I regret raising the matter of his bandy legs, as that's the sort of mud that sticks. And I'm far too busy to delete it.
Enough with the insults. It's gone too far. Long-haired footballers get neverending stick from commentators. Beards are inevitably referred to by one right-wing newspaper as "scruffy", particularly when sported by actresses.
It's all part of the human trait to bully anything that departs from that day's norm. Well, here's what to do with your hair and chain: whatever the hell you like, madam. This isn't North Korea, you know.
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