As a current wearer of a ponytail that reaches my shoulder blades and the previous owner of a wicked-fine mullet (hey, it was the ’80s and it was cool back then… really!), I was extremely interested to learn that “long hair ‘consumes a great deal of nutrition’ and could thus rob the brain of energy.”

This little factoid comes from a North Korean media campaign called “Let us trim our hair in accordance with Socialist lifestyle.” Funny… most of the Socialists I knew in college had hair longer than mine. Not only that, but they didn’t use much product, either. Very untidy. Never seemed to affect their ideological fervor.

Tidiness matters in places other than hair, too. Here’s another important sartorial tip from Pyongyang: “No matter how good the clothes, if one does not wear tidy shoes, one’s personality will be downgraded.”

(Link courtesy of novelist William Gibson.)

In case you haven’t heard, the University of Utah Runnin’ Utes dominated at the Fiesta Bowl on New Year’s Day, winning the game against Pittsburg 35-7. Now, I usually don’t care any more about football than I do about what the guy across the street had for breakfast, but the U is my alma mater, and the team’s bowl win was the capstone to a perfect, undefeated season. That’s pretty noteworthy, and deserving of our congratulations.

However, don’t think for a moment that this event is some kind of conversion experience for me. I didn’t follow U of U football when I was a student there, I haven’t followed it in the 12 years since I graduated, and I don’t think I’m about to begin following it now. Frankly, I don’t get the appeal of sports, not any of them, professional or college-level. Just not my cup of Gatorade.
Still… I’m thinking I might have to get me a commemorative Fiesta Bowl hat. Just to annoy the BYU fans I know, you understand.

Hi, kids. Hope everyone had a good Christmas. Mine was pleasant, if pretty unremarkable overall.

I’ve been thinking this morning about the tragedy that hit Southeast Asia over the holiday weekend, the massive, earthquake-generated waves that battered so many countries and claimed so many lives. I know everyone is talking about this, and there really isn’t much to say in the wake of such death and destruction that hasn’t been said already. Nevertheless, I can’t help but think I’ve got to say something. This event is too big to let it pass without some sort of acknowledgement.

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Still working on the second half of the previous entry, but for now I’ll send out my holiday wish for everyone reading this to have a pleasant day tomorrow. Hope you enjoy the company of family and friends, and, in the words of Beldar Conehead, consume mass quanitities. Hey, we’re Americans; it’s what we do.

Oh, one more thing: if your bird goes missing, check in the living room. They’re masters of concealment…

I’m not much of a sports fan. In fact, I am so not a sports fan that once when someone asked me what I thought about the Jazz — referring, of course, to the Utah Jazz, our local NBA team — I replied that I was more of a rock and blues kind of guy. I wasn’t trying to be a smart-ass. I simply failed to understand his question. And that is perhaps the best symbol of my relationship to the athletic competitions that consume the attention of so many people in our society. It’s not that I dislike sports. I am merely oblivious to them.

Tonight, however, a sporting event of sufficient magnitude occurred that even I cannot ignore it: the football team from my alma mater, the University of Utah, finished off a perfect winning season by pasting the arch-rival BYU Cougars 52-21. Undefeated in eleven games, the Running Utes will now head on to the Fiesta Bowl, the first non-BCS team to become eligible to play in a BCS Bowl game. Whatever that means. That kind of talk has the same effect on me that “technobabble” does on people who don’t watch Star Trek. Just as they wouldn’t know a warp drive from a Klingon disrupter, the terminology is meaningless to me. I just know that it’s something very rare and cool, and that deserves some praise.

So congratulations, Utes.

I won’t be watching the Fiesta Bowl — I probably won’t even realize when it’s on — but it is pleasing to know that my old school has earned such an impressive honor.

It’s a cool, foggy morning here in the suburban south end of the Salt Lake Valley. Under normal conditions, the Wasatch Mountains loom only a couple of miles from my office window, close enough for me to see individual trees sprouting from the knife-edged crags. Today, the mountains are invisible behind a smooth gray curtain that reminds me of smoke inside a soap bubble. Just the kind of day you want to start off with a nice hot beverage, preferably one with caffeine.

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So have you heard about the lastest taste innovations from the Jones Soda Company?

For those who don’t keep up on such things, Jones is kind of a second-tier contender in the Great Soft Drink Wars. Personally, I find their products way too sugary for my tastes, but I’ve long admired the company’s cool photographic labels. The standard product line consists of traditional soda varieties — root beer, vanilla cream, black cherry — as well as some exotic but not too-far-out flavors such as watermelon, chocolate fudge, and blue bubblegum. Now, however, the mad scientists at Jones have outdone themselves by creating limited-edition seasonal flavors that include turkey and gravy, mashed potato and butter, greenbean casserole, cranberry sauce, and fruitcake. Sound nauseating? You have no idea.

Personally, I suspect these holiday sodas were never intended for actual consumption. You’re just supposed to put them on the coffee table as a way of provoking laughter and remarks of good-natured disgust from your Christmas visitors, kind of like setting out a big tray of lutefisk. At least, I hope that’s what the intention is. If someone out there really thinks a greenbean-flavored beverage sounds good, then I’m afraid there’s nothing more modern medicine can do to help you…

Comic book writer Peter David commented today on his blog about some remarks fellow comic writer John Byrne made on his website about Christopher Reeve. Byrne said, essentially, that it is inappropriate for people to be thinking of Reeve as a hero because he did nothing heroic following his accident. Byrne says (and I’m lifting this quote off of David’s site, so apologies if it is taken out of context), “I do not wish to take away one iota of the courage he must have needed not to wake up screaming every single day, but the hard truth is there was nothing ‘heroic’ in what happened to him, or how he dealt with it. In fact, as far as how he dealt with it, he didn’t even have a choice. We could imagine he spent every hour of every day (when not in front of the cameras) begging family members to simply kill him and get it over with — but none of them did, so he had no choice but to deal with each day as it came. Heroism, I believe, involves choice.”

John Byrne, I believe, is an idiot.

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