And now for something completely different

I have not blogged for a while, and today I come back with something light but funny. The sprawling mess that is the Washington Post Style section brings us this uncompromisingly silly analysis of the candidates' hair, and their general above the neck style. A summary:

Dean: "Dean's hair looks as though it was ordered from an old Sears catalogue."

Clark: "There's a certain Mayberry charm to Clark's barbershop cut. Yet who can linger over Clark's perfectly trimmed, supreme-Allied-commander hair when his taut profile is competing for attention?"

Braun: "a low-maintenance style that frees one from dependence on an aide with a large golf umbrella"

Sharpton: "[his] stunning James Brown flip is a triumph of chemicals and heat over nature."

Kucinich: "brushes his hair back away from his face and in that simple gesture manages to look looser and less prepackaged than the other candidates"

Lieberman: "Because his hairline begins at the same latitude as his ears, the vast expanse of furrowed frontage emphasizes that the senator could soon be in danger of perpetuating the comb-over"

Gephardt: "suffers because his strawberry blond hair is indistinguishable from his scalp. On television he tends to look like a lab mouse in a cluster of field mice."

Edwards: "parts his low on the right and a thick mane flops across his forehead like an inverted Nike Swoosh. It is an old man's haircut -- neither short nor rakishly long. Just unremarkably there."

Kerry: "thatch of hair that always looks as though it is one percentage point of humidity away from floating up and off his head . . . a thick, glamorous quality . . . It edges toward dashing, hints at vanity but steers clear of roguish."

I am glad that the paper in the nation's capital has the time to do this, and I am glad someone finally called Gerphardt a "lab mouse," even in this context.
- posted by Anonymous @ 7:09 AM