Category Archives: Total trivia

So… does he practice this at home?

That is the richest man in the world. Which I think maybe tells you something about the state of the world in 2024. Or at least, I suppose, the state of Twitter.

The richest man in the world didn’t used to look like this. For instance, here’s J.P. Morgan, at right. He was Mr. Moneybags in his day, and he wielded political power of the sort that I suppose Elon Musk is hoping to obtain by this ridiculous display of his joy at the possibility of electing the most dangerous man in the world. Even Teddy Roosevelt had to consider Morgan in making major policy considerations. He was a force, rather than a mere goofy distraction.

You’ll see that there’s a different quality on display. Some of you younger folks may not recognize it. It was called “dignity.” (OK, so there’s also a kind of grumpy “I am the Walrus” vibe there, too, but I’m calling it “dignity” because that speaks better to my point.)

Let’s not mock uninhibited joy, though. People should be allowed to let the world know when they’re happy. I suppose it should make us all smile.

And maybe it would, if he weren’t leaping for joy at the prospect of doing to America and the whole world what he did to Twitter, only way worse.

And also… maybe if it didn’t smack of artifice.

Jump up like that once with a blissed-out look on your face, and maybe it’s believable. Weird, but believable.

But twice, on different occasions? Seeing the second one, below, made me think, Does Musk practice this “jump up and show my belly” maneuver in his spare time? How else could more than one such photo exist? (The one above is from The New York Times, and I found the one below in The Washington Post, and I hope they don’t mind my showing them to you, because that’s kind of necessary to making my point.)

In fact, having all that money to throw away, has he hired a professional “jumping with joyful abandon coach” to supervise his practice sessions? Does he do this, over and over, in front of a mirror? Have they practiced with tee shirts made from different fabrics, to ensure exactly the right amount of exposure of his belly?

Seeing the second image kind of makes me think so. And it makes me think something else: If this is the richest man in the world today, maybe our economic system is rewarding the wrong characteristics. Maybe something is a bit off at the moment…

This is more MY kind of quiz — but I still blew it

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I think I got a little overexcited, and hurried a bit too much. How else do I explain missing the one that asked, “The Pantheon, rebuilt during the reign of Emperor Hadrian, is a major landmark in which European capital city?”

That was really, really stupid. If only I’d read it a tad more carefully. But I was going to miss a couple of others anyway. People who concoct these tests all seem to think to themselves, Let’s throw in a football one, so Brad misses at least that one. So they do. And I did, because I’d never heard of any of the four people I had to chose from.

I had a similar problem with this: “Which song is the highest-charting single on the Billboard Hot 100 for the band Panic! at the Disco?” Really? That’s a band?

But still, I appreciate the shift to a more general trivia test — since I read less news now, and never read some of the things Slate counts as “news” — and was really enjoying it for the first few questions, thinking I was going to ace it.

Notice that they didn’t go with a staffer as the “ringer” on this one. They went with a “Slate Plus Member,” which is really unfair. We’ve established in the past that the average Slate reader is often smarter than the average Slate editor (and smarter that yours truly, but let’s not get into that).

Anyway, I’ll be interested to see how some of y’all like it…

The engaging uselessness of Pinterest

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Pinterest thinks momentary flickers of interest define me.

Pinterest seems quite sure that momentary flickers of interest define me.

I never have time for this, but sometimes when I think I do — standing in line at the store or whatever — I’ll open the Pinterest app on my phone and see what it’s offering me now.

Pinterest is a contender for most useless social medium ever. It’s neck-and-neck with LinkedIn, only more fun.

I remember, years and years ago, when I first signed up for it, spending an hour or so scanning through the images being offered, telling myself I needed to do that in order to make the app “work.” I was letting it build a portrait of me and my interests, based on which images I “pinned,” or simply called up to look at better.

I found it an interesting, idle spectacle. Like watching spots of sunlight filter through the leaves of trees in a light breeze. Or watching whitecaps dance on the sea. Or maybe flames in a fireplace.

Actually, the flames make the best comparison, because you can change the patterns somewhat by poking at the logs. And that’s how Pinterest works.

If there’s a practical use for Pinterest, it escapes me. But I suppose it’s mostly harmless, although the mechanism I see in operation is the same as what has made other social media, and sites such as YouTube, such a threat to our reason and our society. As I’ve written here and here and here.

The algorithm is doing that same thing: Asking me to tell it — by “pinning,” or simply by spending time looking — what interests me. And then it says, “If you like that, you’ll love this.” And shows me more and more of the same thing.

Which can be sort of comical, because it leaps to such odd conclusions. Remember that post I wrote about posters I had on my bedroom walls as a kid? Probably not, since it only got two comments, one of them written by me. But I enjoyed writing it — actually, what I enjoyed more was searching the web for the actual images. And the one I played the biggest was the one of Steve McQueen riding a motorcycle on the set of “The Great Escape.” Which may have been my favorite poster. I know that that was my favorite movie when I was a kid.

Anyway, in searching for it, I must have looked on Pinterest. Anyway, it caused the algorithm to assume that I am obsessed with Steve McQueen, especially when he’s riding a motorcycle. I inadvertently reinforced the McQueen thing by pinning a pic or two from “Wanted: Dead or Alive,” which was a favorite show of mine when it was on, 1958-61.

Ever since then, any time I call up the Pinterest homepage, I’ll see five or 10 or more pics of McQueen in a minute of scrolling, often on a bike. They may go away if the app is momentarily distracted by some other assumed “obsession,” but they always come back eventually.

Hey, I like Steve McQueen. Just not that much.

Actually, though, I’m not seeing him much today. Today, the app thinks I’m crazy about flamenco dancers. That’s because lately I’ve been putting random black-and-white pictures on a wide variety of subjects into my “Images” folder. And taking a quick look at the app this morning, I saw this shot with a little girl in the background framing by a wide skirt being flourished by a dancer. I didn’t even notice what kind of dancer it was; I just liked the composition and sense of motion, and thought my daughter the dance teacher might like it.

So now it just knows I’m nuts about flamenco, and I’m getting flamenco dancers left, right and center — especially if they happen to have on polka-dot dresses. It even thinks I want to see a flamenco guitarist, and close-ups of castanets.

Steve McQueen is gone, for the moment.

I’m also getting a lot of pictures of Ernest Hemingway from his late, white-beard phase. This happened because one of my kids really liked cats, so I had pinned a shot of Hemingway with one of his famous Key West cats. Now he’s all over the place, with or without cats, because of that one picture. A little while ago it showed me one of him with a dog (see image below).

It’s fun to mess with the algorithms head like this, if you assume for a moment that it has a head. It takes practically nothing, the smallest gesture on my part, for it to make huge assumptions about what motivates and animates me. And it’s all so wonderfully superficial, because it’s just pictures — the content is so shallow! There’s virtually no text, and what little there is seems to play little role in the process.

The machine isn’t completely stupid. It’s right, for instance, to believe I like Calvin and Hobbes, and Norman Rockwell. And it has an inkling that it can always grab my attention with the kinds of pinup pictures that adorned the noses of warplanes in WWII. But that’s hardly a personality profile.

I’ve been fretting recently about what artificial intelligence is doing to our politics. But I find a few minutes with Pinterest reassuring. Look where it’s going now!, I tell myself. And for that moment, I’m less concerned about AI’s ability to take over the world. Yet, anyway…

EDITOR’S NOTE: Yeah, I know I wrote about this before, years ago. But thinking recently about what these algorithms were doing to our minds, I started playing with this medium again — just to watch the way it works — so I wrote about it again.

Wait! Lemme run get my notebook

Is originality dead? For that matter, did it ever exist?

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This morning there was this huge Google Adsense ad spread across the top of my blog, right under the header (this one), for something called “Chummy Tees.”

There was no picture, so, wondering what was being promoted on my blog, I Googled the company (I didn’t dare click on the ad, as Google forbids me to do that). And I saw, among the rather plain, gray tee shirts being promoted, one that said “SURELY NOT EVERYONE WAS KUNG FU FIGHTING.”

And that cracked me up. I might be meaningless to people too young to remember the song, but I loved it. A perfect low-key joke for, say, an editor — someone who has spent most of his adult life keeping reporters from making extravagant statements that can’t be backed up. (Which is another way of saying you might not find it funny, but I do.)

I kind of liked this one, too.

I wasn’t going to shell out $23.95 for the shirt, of course. I’m neither crazy nor made of money. But… maybe I’d like to put it on my Amazon list. So I go to Amazon — I didn’t have to hunt for it because I already had a pop-up window from Amazon begging me to go there for such shirts — and it seems that while everyone may not be kung fu fighting, everyone seems to make a sure with that line (although all these used “everybody” instead of “everyone,” which is truer to the song).

And it got me to thinking, and not for the first time, that in the Internet age, we are no longer allowed to delude ourselves into thinking we have had an original thought. You think of something clever — something that in eras past you would have congratulated yourself for coming up with, convinced that you were quite the wag — and then for whatever reason you Google it, and you find out an army of people got there before you.

And this is frustrating. It fosters fatalism — why even TRY to come up with something good?, you ask yourself.

Yesterday on a podcast I was listening to, there was a discussion of the many ways that the internet casts a pall on our lives, bringing ills previously unimagined, and making us dread the future.

Add this to the list. It takes any small attempt to be original, and slams it to the ground.

And it makes you doubt there was ever anything such as originality. We may have thought we were clever, but that’s because we didn’t have the Web to set us straight. Each time you patted yourself on the back for a happy thought back in, say, 1975, there were a million other people out there having the same thought and thinking they were clever, too.

And we were all happier…

Bill WHO? Sometimes Google mystifies me

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I was reading a Bret Stephens piece from over the weekend, about what he sees as lessons from the Clinton impeachment, which was accompanied by this file photo of Bill in 1998.

I was struck by how young he looked. And I was wondering how young he was, and went to Google it.

And I ran across something odd.

I typed “bill” followed by a space, and above were the results I got. Which mystified me. I wasn’t totally stunned that Bill Cosby came first. Even though he has been more thoroughly shamed and degraded by his actions in the public eye, he is someone who once enjoyed great fame and acclamation.

But I figured Clinton would surely come next. But instead, of the next four “Bills,” only one was someone I had even heard of — Bill Gates. I would have to click to learn who Bill Nunn, Bill Goldberg and Bill Burr are or were. Which I didn’t do.

Instead, I added a “c,” and sure enough there was Bill Clinton — although still second to Cosby. See below. (And no, I have no idea who the two Callahans or Cowher are.)

Usually, I can intuit why Google offers me certain results — they reflect what is in the news, or other things I’ve recently searched for.

But sometimes it stumps me. This is one of those times.

Any idea why those bills — Nunn, Goldberg and Burr — come up before “Clinton?”

I’m losing my photographic memory for trivia!

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Is that a sign of aging?

Whatever it is, I’m shocked at something I couldn’t remember today.

Someone had said to me that Steph Curry had played basketball at Davidson, which I knew was supposed to impress me, but all it did was cause me to go look up “Steph Curry.” (And it turns out he IS quite impressive).

Because, you know, I don’t do real-life sports. I do frequently enjoy fictional sports (I like the idea of sports more than the reality), so I can tell you all about Roy Hobbs and Bartholomew “Bump” Bailey and Willie “Mays” Hayes and (now that Bryan has me watching “Friday Night Lights”) “Smash” Williams, Tim Riggins and Matt Saracen.

So anyway, defending myself, I boasted that while I don’t know this Curry guy, I can name all the Hickory Huskers from “Hoosiers.”

But then, privately, I tried to do so, and without looking them up, all I came up with was this:

Rade
Buddy
Shooter’s son
Ollie
Strap
Jimmy Chitwood
Buddy’s friend who said, “I ain’t no gizzard.”

Best I could do. Which is lame.

Can you flesh out the roster with full names?

You can check yourself against this…

And look — there’s Merle! I forgot him altogether!…

Setting the record straight on ‘The Dirty Dozen’

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Can you name them? Not these guys, the ones in the book…

I love it when I find out that someone somewhere has, at least for a brief moment, obsessed about something trivial that had obsessed me.

It makes me feel… almost normal. Or at least, human.

In the past, as an illustration of the perverse way that my brain works, I have bragged/told on myself for remembering the names of all the characters in The Dirty Dozen, which I read when I was about 13.

The book, mind you. I wouldn’t expect anyone to be able to name the 12 in the movie, because the movie doesn’t fully introduce them all.

Oh, and the list is different. This is partly because, for whatever reason, Archer Maggot — played by Telly Savalas — was a mashup of three very different characters from the book. Maggot was a redneck career criminal from Phenix City, Ala., a really malevolent, violent guy. Calvin Ezra Smith was a prison convert who constantly quoted Scripture. Myron Odell was a shy little rabbit of a man who was scared of women, and supposedly had killed a woman who came onto him sexually (which he vehemently denied).

I’m not sure why they combined those three into one, but somehow Savalas pulled it off, so hats off to him. But then they had to make up a couple of names of characters to replace Smith and Odell. Then there was the fact that Jim Brown’s character was nothing like the one black character in the book, so they changed his name from Napoleon White to Robert Jefferson. White had been an officer and an intellectual (he and Capt. Reisman have debates about the writings of T.E. Lawrence), which I guess they thought didn’t fit Brown, so they made Charles Bronson the ex-officer.

They went on to change several other characters’ names — sometimes just the first names — for reasons that would only be understandable to a Hollywood producer.

Anyway, I’m going on about this because today, while looking for something totally unrelated, I ran across this Los Angeles Times story from way back in 2000. And it contained this paragraph:

Can you name all 12? Roll call: Charles Bronson as Joseph Wladislaw; Jim Brown as Robert Jefferson; Tom Busby as Milo Vladek; John Cassavetes as Victor Franko; Ben Carruthers as Glenn Gilpin; Stuart Cooper as Roscoe Lever; Trini Lopez as Pedro Jimenez; Colin Maitland as Seth Sawyer; Al Mancini as Tassos Bravos; Telly Savalas as Archer Maggott; Donald Sutherland as Vernon Pinkley; and Clint Walker as Samson Posey.

Wow, I thought. There’s someone else on the planet who has wasted gray cells memorizing the names of the Dirty Dozen! Worse, memorizing the names of the ones in the movie, not the real ones!

It gave me a fellow-feeling, if only for a moment, for this Donald Liebenson who wrote the piece…

Anyway, the real names, from the 1965 E.M. Nathanson novel:

Victor Franko
Archer Maggot
Calvin Ezra Smith
Myron Odell
Glenn Gilpin
Ken (not Seth) Sawyer
Napoleon White
Samson Posey
Roscoe Lever
Luis (not Pedro) Jimenez
Vernon Pinkley
Joe Wladislaw

I’ve just never thought of it as a good place to meet girls

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Really? You lost a girl to THIS guy?

Today is a day for wondering for me. And while I was walking across the USC campus at midday today, I finally decided to ask about something that has bugged me for decades:

Listening to Pandora while walking, and wondering yet again, so I’m just going to ask this time: How exactly does one meet “a girl so fair” in “the darkest depths of Mordor?” Rohan, mayBE, but Mordor?

— Brad Warthen (@BradWarthen) February 12, 2019

And you lost her to the guy pictured above? You are evidently not favored among men. Or hobbits, either…

In Rohan, mayBE. But Mordor, never…

How is Wyoming more patriotic than WE are?

Henry McMaster’s accent is a state treasure and should be preserved in a museum

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I thought that all through his State of the State address back in January, but I don’t think I said so here at the time.

It’s one thing to quote Henry saying some awful things. It’s another to watch the video above. You forget what he’s saying because you’re so fascinated by the way he says it. Or at least, I do.

The problem, you see, with those high school kids walking out of class the other day is that “Ah unduhstayund that theyah’s a left-wing group that is, uh, co-awdinading this around the country…”

They’re being used as a “tooool,” you see. (Actually, I don’t know how to represent the way he says it phonetically, but the “oo” sound is wholly unlike the way I say it.) At least, that’s the conclusion he’s drawn from the “infuhmation” he’s seen.

Every time I listen to him, I’m sort of struck with awe. I feel I’m transported back in time, although to where or when I’m not sure. I hope a museum somewhere in South Carolina is saving good recordings of this.

Mind you, I’m not pointing to the way he talks as a bad thing or a good thing. But it’s definitely a thing, and it seems to be unique. I don’t know anyone else who speaks quite the way he does.

I know some other folks in public life who have thick, distinctive accents, some of them very smart people — folks such as Jean Toal and Alex Sanders, and to some extent Dick and Joe Riley. And let us not forget Fritz Hollings. But none of them sound like they’re from the same place Henry comes from.

I notice that the folks I mention are a few years, or even a generation, older than I am. (They also, with the exception of Henry, are Democrats. Don’t know why, but thick-accented Republicans don’t leap to mind as readily. Joe Wilson, for instance, is virtually accentless.)

That make me think it’s to some extent a TV thing. These folks’ speech patterns had just enough time to take hold before television taught all of us to sound like we were from Nebraska, or wherever the geographical home of Standard American English is located.

Which is not to say that younger people don’t have accents. For instance, no one would doubt that James Smith, to name but one, is from the South. But their accents tend to be softer, less in-your-face, than the older folks I mention above.

Of course, I’m talking about smart, educated people. I notice their accents more than I do those of people who are neither of those things, because I expect education to have sanded off the rough edges of their manner of communication. Which is generally the case.

But not with Henry. His accent is perfect, untouched, and really something special…

Hey, look! A male model I can identify with…

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model male

A lot of women have celebrated the arrival on the modern scene of plus-size models. But Madison Avenue has not bothered to come up with male models who look like normal, ruggedly handsome guys like me — until now.

I saw the above ad on the New York Times website this morning. Don’t you think the guy on the right is a dead ringer — either for me or David Letterman?

Of course, I don’t have the beard at the moment, but maybe it’s time it made a reappearance.

I feel so… validated….

bearded one

Random images I shot and sort of like…

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I Tweeted this out with the words, “Warm light of the setting sun falls on the heart of downtown Columbia — seen from @CapCityClubCola.”

First, I’m not claiming these images I shot yesterday are great. I did not set out to take great images. I did not set out to shoot any images. It’s just that, when you have an iPhone, you shoot things like these as you go along. I do, anyway.

I took this still life on the bar at the Cap City Club, a moment before the shot above.

I’d like them better if they were of higher resolution. I wish I could have shot them with a high-end SLR, a digital version of the Nikon 8008s that sits in a drawer in my bedroom, and has for years, because it uses film. But I don’t have one of those.

But that doesn’t bother me much, because you don’t get trivial, serendipitous photos if you wait until you’re lugging a camera around. A virtue of this (relatively) new world of photography is that you’re always ready to shoot, limited only by the length of time it takes to whip out your phone (not long for me, since I’m one of those geeks who keeps it in a holster on his belt).

Anyway, they’re not much, but I thought I’d share…

This was a disappointment. The sight of workers backed by the big, blue sky was way better IRL.

This was a disappointment. The sight of workers backed by the big, blue sky was way more striking IRL.

My car is SUCH a crybaby

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Stop me if I’ve mentioned this before…

These days I drive a 1997 Volvo. It’s a great car, although a bit worse for wear. It was my father-in-law’s car, and my wife inherited it from him. The last few months I’ve been driving it, because our larger, newer Buick is more suitable for my wife to chauffeur the grandchildren in.

I love it, especially in the winter, as it’s the only vehicle among our three with heated seats. I hate having hot, dry air in my face. So I fire up the seat, and let the air I’m breathing stay relatively cool. It’s great.

But, being from Sweden, the car gets seriously traumatized by Columbia summers. For one thing, it has air-conditioning that probably works great in a place where a hot summer’s day is about 75 degrees, but tends to get overwhelmed by our Famously Hot days. But that’s OK; I stay comfortable enough.

I can’t say the same for the car. It freaks out, and the most dramatic manifestation of this is that it starts lying pathologically. On a typical summer day, it pretty much always claims that the temperature is 10 degrees higher than it is. It’s like it’s making excuses: You expect air-conditioning to deal with this kinda heat? Are you nuts?!?

Today, I left it parked with the windows and sunroof open, so it wouldn’t get too hot. I came back to the car, and it was claiming that the temp was 108 degrees!

I checked my phone. It was 92.

Again, I love the car, but it is such a whiner…

Top Five Things Wrong With This PBS Quiz

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As y’all know, I dig PBS almost as much as I do NPR, and it’s basically the only broadcast outlet I ever watch. (Mostly I have a TV for Netflix and Amazon Prime, and occasionally, when I’m feeling retro, a DVD.)

So I have high expectations when I see the PBS logo. Which is why I was so disappointed by this lame “Which Decade Do You Belong In?” quiz.

The whole thing was phoned in for the shallowest of purposes — promotion of three “Masterpiece Mystery” series. Nothing is offered that would provide a serious time traveler with helpful insight into which decade he would be most at home in.

Here are the Top Five things wrong with it:

The individual questions force you into ridiculous choices. Such as “Choose a Women’s Hairstyle,” and the options are “Beehive,” “Poodle cut” and “Shag.” In other words, you have to have a fave among the most extreme, least appealing, hairstyles of three decades. (The worst: “Who’s your biggest critic?”, with the choices being “The Establishment,” “The Church,” and “Your mother.” Y’all know me: I’ve got no beef with any of those parties. But I chose “The Establishment” because I knew that would make me cool in at least one of the three decades on offer.)
Even if the individual questions offered minimal guidance, there aren’t enough of them to add up to anything helpful. There are only seven of them! I mean, why even bother inventing a time machine to begin with? With info like this, even if I fell and hit my head and thought of the flux capacitor, I wouldn’t bother to build it, because I’d have no idea where I wanted to go!
Crass commercialism. Or, since this is technically not commercial television, crass… I don’t know… promotionalism! There have been loads of fine “Masterpiece Mystery!” shows over the years, set in many very fine decades, but this is all about three that were currently showing or about to have a season premiere. About as shallow as you can get, and strangely trapped in the current moment, considering that the point is to appeal to people who presumably want to live in other moments.
Lack of truly cool decades. Forced to choose between the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, I of course ended up in the 50s, which will surprise few of you. But that’s because the decade of 1800-1810 wasn’t even offered! And you would think that PBS, if it exerted itself even slightly, would be able to manage that…
One of the three shows that inspired this insipidity was a show that I haven’t even watched,
No Annie Cartwright.

from lack of interest: “Prime Suspect: Tennison.” I tried watching it one night, but quickly lost interest, mainly because it takes us back to the Metropolitan Police Service in 1973. In other words, it covers ground already covered far more entertainingly by “Life on Mars.” The central character is a young WPC trying to make her way in a service just beginning, reluctantly, to take female cops seriously. And I’m sorry — I’m sure she does her best, but she is no Annie Cartwright! Anyway, I lived through the 1970s; I became an adult in the 1970s, so show me something more interesting.

In the grand scheme of things, of course, such quizzes are beneath the dignity of PBS, which is probably why the person who contrived this just gave it a lick and a promise. But if you’re going to try to engage my appetite for quiz clickbait, then make it worthy of the PBS name!

That is all…

A musical interlude: Life Accordion to Trump

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Just a little light musical fare to make the new week seem more bearable…

Wow, those chairs really looked… festive

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The state of South Carolina’s electric chair, once a more frequently used form of execution, is shown here in 1998. The viewing room to the right is where media, lawyers and family members from both sides sat as witnesses. THE STATE File photograph

I hope my friends at The State won’t mind my using this old file photo they just posted, but I was really struck by the incongruity of the decor.

Imagine that being your last sight as you were being executed. Instead of, “I really wish I hadn’t done it,” you might think, “Where the hell did those chairs come from? Couldn’t they have found something a bit more respectful of the occasion?” Which would be a stupid thing to be thinking at a time like that…

Those chairs look like they escaped from a “My Pretty Pony” cartoon. I wonder for what purpose the state ever purchased them to start with?

Boris, could you please first do something about the hair?

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I said this on Twitter earlier today:

Just one thing: Before @BorisJohnson becomes P.M., will he do something about the Trumpesque hair? That would make him easier to tolerate…

— Brad Warthen (@BradWarthen) June 27, 2016

But that’s not exactly right.

Trump’s hair and Johnson’s do have things in common — they’re both light-colored, they’re both flamboyant and they’re both ridiculous.

Boris Johnson’s actual Twitter profile photo.

But there’s a huge, defining difference, which actually makes them opposites: Trump’s hair is ridiculous because it’s so obvious that he goes to far too much trouble to make it look like that. Johnson’s is distracting because he goes out of his way to look like he does nothing with it, that he has never in his life seen a comb or had anything to do with one.

In any case, both are distracting, and do not inspire the kind of confidence one would like to have in the head of a major country.

Boris’ hair in the actual, formal portrait photo at right, reminds me of my grandson — he resists anyone combing his hair, firmly declaring that he prefers that it remain “bumpy.” In a 4-year-old, this is endearing, and I have been known to compliment him on the bumpiness of his hair. In fact, I regularly reach out and muss it up for him.

But in a grown man who wishes to be taken seriously by other grown men, it is ridiculous.

Now is the time on bradwarthen.com when we all harrumph together over men among us with ridiculous hair.

Harrumph, harrumph, harrumph, harrumph, harrumph…

What sort of hair should a serious world leader have? The sort that we don’t notice. The sort that, if someone asks us to describe it when we’re not looking at it, we can’t. We shouldn’t even be able to swear whether he has hair or not, unless it’s right in front of us. It should be that understated and unobtrusive.

I’ll pause now for a moment while you all say, Hear, hear!

Hear, hear! Hear, hear! Hear, hear! Hear, hear!…