Facial Hair Again

Last night I saw (from a distance) a guy I used to be friends with in the 90’s. He came to my parties, played cards, charmed my female friends and my sister even, because he was very handsome for Whitey in a kind of rough around the edges, northern European way.

Now he has a beard down to his navel and long grey-speckled hair collected on top of his head in a bun. He looks 20 years older than he is, and 30 years older than he could have looked if he’d kept on shaving and had the occasional haircut.

Yes yes, so vanity is bad, but really? And in the heat? Can not understand, as my Japanese student, who also fancied him at the time, always used to say.

So I got thinking about facial hair, that scourge of mankind and my least favourite rodent, again. All right, so forget about heat, scratching and itching, little animals and food trapped in the thicket and the ugliness of it all. Forget about looking 20 years older and forever catapulting oneself out of the romance market.

I think men should shave because it’s only fair. I mean, we women have to shower, use skin products, blow-dry, anoint, put on make-up, primp, preen, bleach, inject, add breasts, scatter rose-petals all over ourselves and brush our teeth – every day.

Isn’t it then the least guys can do, to spend two to three minutes on something?

 P.S. The beard in the photo is not that of the formerly handsome for whitey mentioned above – that guy’s beard really goes down to his navel! The beard above belongs to a man who is still a friend of mine, but at whom it would be so much easier to look if he got the old secaturs and Gilette out…

 

At Last, A Chance To See Some Breasts

You can say what you want about South East Asia’s biggest outdoor sitting bronze English-language newspaper the South China Morning Post, and many people do.

But one thing it doesn’t do is rely on breasts to sell copy.

The local newspapers, on the other hand, are not a monopoly and therefore in strong competition with each other. They need at least one breast per front page, every day of the week, to move their merchandise.

It is by now pretty much impossible for the press to get more mileage out of the Edison Chen and the Bonkstresses saga without looking like money-grubbing exploiters of the female shape. The local media must therefore be thanking on their knees the “serial killer of South Asian appearance” who single-handedly brought the breast back to the front page by strangling women for pocket-money.

Now every front page is bursting with undulating flesh and plunging cleavages again, and the fact that their owners are
1. Prostitutes and
2. Murdered,

makes it even more tantalizing. Apparently a man has been arrested, so unless he’s innocent or a new killer strikes, the local papers will have to resort to boring old photos of jumping suicides and meat-cleaver hacked corpses again.

All we can hope for is that other celebrities have been filming each other while engaging in “sex acts” or murder, and that there are still computer technicians with social conscience who will step forward with the evidence.