Paparazzi 2001: Great Lords & Ladies with Beards & Mustaches

Friend-of-the-Blog & good-woman-in-a-tight-corner Miss Annalee F. was photographed by undercover photojournalists at this SWANKY New York party, with a sequined woman on her arm & a fat bandito MUSTACHE on her face.

Scandalous! I trust the itwaslost.org treasury secretary will fully understand appropriating the entire spring budget to pay the paparazzi who snapped this shot.

When I was talking to the documentarian (mentioned below) who is just finishing her movie on the Beard Club, I asked if she met any bearded ladies. She said Jennifer Miller (pictured in an artsy Leibovitzy rendering to the right) of New York City's Circus Amok, is the most famous living bearded lady. More on this to come.

In the meantime, watch this classic Christian Rock from the 1980s.

Beards We Know, Part One: Special February Mustache Month Edition, Focus on Sierra Nevada Mountains

In our new segment in the Department of Beards, Beards We Know, we'd like to highlight a few of the beards we got to know in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. In honor of February Mustache Month, I've tried to include a picture of the beard next to it in its mustache formation. I must note sadly that, like mine, many of these beards have now left us.




Mr Tomas, gambler & world traveler, cofounder of the Mimosas Witnesses, showcasing his Red Revolutionary Beard next to his Turkish Mystic mustache. Very nice.




















Mr Martineau, quite handsome in just a mustache...
















& also in his shaggy mountain look (here pictured with Mr Quill & Herr Liebwiener.)
















Mr Hermann, band promoter & Obama caucus organizer, the kindest soul, native of Naples, Vermont, where even the young girls have beards.















Mr Ficke, the angels still sing of your facial hair. Just yesterday, in the cold gutters of Santiago, you posted this memo on the facebooks:

Beard v. Chile. Chile VICTORIOUS.

Yesterday at 4:35pm

Yes, Mega-Beard #2 has taken leave of my face. I granted its freedom last night after I couldn´t shake the thought... ¨wait, why do I still have this beard?¨ At first I was just gonna trim, but you get few beers in me and I tend to start shaving things. This time, there is no photographic evidence of the process, but ohhh, there´s nothing like it. Using tiny scissors to take chunks out of something that has been lounging on my visage for about 6 months now.. holding the gnarly ball of red, beholding the glorious ¨butt chin¨that has been in seclusion for so long. As Eva Freeman would put it, I´ve reverted to ¨Nakey Bum-Face¨. Once again, it was astonishing to discover how small my face really is, and how much I lstill look like that high school marching band picture my mom has framed upstairs. Freaky.

My main ammo for provoking /shocking passersby in South America is gone. But I still secretly snicker at the disturbing proliferation of mullets. My god, man, I´ve discovered the nexus of the next mullet uprising, and I believe it to be a combined effort of Chile and Argentina. When traveling solo, you quickly realize one steadfast truth--you have TIME. Ever feel like you don´t have enough time in the day? Buy a one way ticket and go somewhere alone. Time will become, depending on your level of creativity and willingness to explore, your friend or your bane, but most likely a poignant combo of both. My point is, you develop little habits, or create games. One of my favorite pasttimes quickly became ¨Mullet Tabulation¨. There aren´t really any rules or points or winning, but beer is definitely recommended.

MULLETS.

So, instead of feeling slightly insecure in Latin America about my monstrous beard, now I´m self-conscious of the void hovering about my grill. It´s cool though, as I think that, maybe, quite possibly, a girl yelled (in Spanish) something that perhaps could be translated as ¨call me!¨

Sometimes its the random comments from passing cars that count the most.

Videos: World Beard & Mustache Championships; I love Jesus but I drink a little.

Ms Jessica Beer of Portland (pictured to the left conducting a choir of unbearded angels), today on the facebooks, called our attention to two videos. The first is from the 2003 World Beard & Mustache Championships in Carson City, Nevada.

Look! One of the men on the runway is the very mustache I posted below! In response to my "25 Things" note (which I'll probably post here tomorrow), she writes "There are only 107 days left until the World Beard and Moustache Championships. Do you have your ticket to Anchorage yet? http://www.worldbeardchampionships.com/index.html."
The Department of Beards & February Month of the Mustache are bearing so much fruit!

The second video is a fine moment in daytime talkshow history:

Best Laid Schemes of Beards & Bees

In the comment on the below post in the Department of Beards, Pele asked if beards of bees would be covered, & sent this picture. Yes! However, there was no mustache of bees on his beard, preferring to wear it in pacifist Amish style, & since February is the Month of the Mustache, I did a little research. Of course, there is such a thing on God's bee-bearded earth. The United States Department of Agriculture has a news article entitled "Cranberry-Polinating Bee wears a Mustache."

Every child knows bees live in hives, make honey, pollinate flowers, and deliver a sting if provoked. But if pollinating cranberries is the goal, there may be another, better-suited bee.

Consider Anthophora abrupta, or the mustached mud bee, so called because the males use a pheromone-soaked mustache to woo females in the spring. [...]

Mustached mud bees are truly as American as the cranberries they may someday be used to pollinate. These native bees live in dry clay walls and cliffs, not in hives. The adults fly during early summer; the rest of the year, they live inside nests. They look like small, fast-flying bumble bees.

Unlike honey bees, whose reproduction is a privilege for the queen, every solitary bee female has a chance at motherhood and the work of gathering food. They are called mud bees because females build chimneys of mud at the nest entrances. Mud bees are not as likely to sting as honey and bumble bees.

To conclude, bees with mustaches live in a more gender-equal society, not in spite of their bee mustaches, but because of them.

Sub-Department of the Big Maytapchiya: Февруари - месец на мустаците : "February - Month of the Mustache"

This blog post from "Блог на Павел Николов" was sent to me this morning from Mr Quill in Bulgaria. I will post the Google Translation of the essay "February - Month of the Mustache" by Nikolov Pavel in its entirety under our newly spearheaded Department of Beards, Sub-Department of the Big Maytapchiya. Quill, if you'd like to edit this post & fix up the translation, or at least explain some of the quirks, altho I don't see how it can be much improved upon. Move over Black History Month!

February - Month of the Mustache

So said my friend and colleague Jason, who is a big maytapchiya. Not been for some February and April, even May, but the University, which studied, the month of February was the mustache. And offered to honor mustakatiya month, you run mustache. I, of course, agreed, my wife and I looked a little special, but she agrees (or at least be peace). And how not to agree (or peace), did Guy de Mopasan said kiss without mustache is like eating without salt. Mopasan was of course the mustache:

A Bulgarian heroic history is full of mustakati men. Which holds Panajot Hitov championship:

With regard to world history we know that the only difference between Nazism and communism in the mustache:

In a word - is something important mustache. So this is the result to me at the beginning of the month (still mizhava work):

And this is the result of Jason:

At the end of the month will be a comparable achievement, will make one final picture will officially shave mustache. By next February.

(Here is the address of Feysgrupata Mustache Month - Peace Corps Bulgaria, which Jason has created).

James is in Finnegans Wake and James is in Finnegans Wake

I am reading a book wherein, on page 145, a copy of a letter written by Leonard Lyons to Julius Marx includes this excerpt of a Thornton Wilder letter to Leonard Lyons:

RE Groucho and "Finnegans Wake"- I have long thought he was in the book. Weren't the Marx Brothers once in a skit about Napoleon? I seem to remember them wearing tricornes, etc. Anyway, on pages 8 and 9

(pause for retrieval of your personal editions)

there is a visit to the Wellington Museum at Waterloo and I read ... "This is the three lipoleum Coyne Grouching down in the living detch."

On page 154, just a bit further on in the book I am reading, a letter from Tom S. Eliot, Missourian, to Julius Henry Marx, New Yorker, reads:

P.S. I like cigars too but there isn't any cigar in my portrait either.

But where is this portrait? (I know where it is, having read the letter - anyone familiar with portraits and their usual place may guess awkwardly, ashamed) The portrait is in this book and not in this book I am reading. The portrait is both somewhere outside of this book and inside this book. It was not entirely in any of your minds and it is now in your minds, though you might not yet have figured out where the physical nature of the portrait resides.

James, as we have known is not in "Finnegans Wake." James, also, as we(us) have known has not been in "Finnegans Wake." We have and continue to know, knowing that I like James Henry Welsch and James Eliot Quill and neither are in my portrait. Consequently, James Henry Welsch is James Joyce's thin goy mustache, I am Julius' thick greasepaint jew mustache, and James Eliot Quill is in Bulgaria, working on his being his very own mustache, and all of us three are in and are not in "Finnegans Wake."

Movie Review: Borat

Last Thursday, I was walking thru the U.C. Berkeley Campus, & I stumbled into line for free passes to an advance screening of Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. There was a slight confusion about my status as student (I told them I was a Scientology Major), but I got my big postcard. So I saw it this Thursday, in a hall full of rowdy, fully-appreciative 18-to-22-year-olds, probably the only suitable environment.

I walked the twenty blocks to campus, many hours early, & drank a few “soltice”-style pints in the university “lair”. There was loud thumping music, of course, but I spent both lemon-tinted pints reading Nabokov's Ada; Or, Ardor. With some European upper-class inflection, as Ada's mother has, both title & subtitle are supposed to sound about the same. I'm about a hundred pages into this book, about one-sixth. It's shocking, like Borat. It was a shocking night. Ada, in its own way a sequel to Lolita, is about cousins who are actually siblings, who have, whilst summering in Eden, their first physical contact. Wordplay & entymology, it's about anagrams: insect, incest. I guess it could be a companion-piece to Lolita – Humbert Humbert, you remember, had a proto-nymphet experience when he was a youth, which set the stage for his later perversion. A better way to understand it, both Van Veen & Humbert recognize true beauty & respond with an unquenchable erection. Humbert is fundamentally un-creative tho, & although he loves his nymphet, he doesn't get her intellect, & he's never really interested in her beautiful brain, his fatal flaw if anything is – one critic compares the book to a despot possessing a population, demanding allegiance thru rape whilst shutting himself off from true connection. I shouldn't comment yet on the quality of Van's lust, but I think he is legitimately turned on in part by his sister's intellect, even if he's bored by her pretentious scientific descriptions of caterpillars.

Sasha Baron Cohen is in a great position to mock American culture, expose it as racist & backwards, & Americans are dying to be constantly reaffirmed in this suspicion. At his best on Da Ali G Show, he acts far over the top, so that no sane focused individual could be fooled by the fraud of a fake foreigner making impossible & impossibly offensive cultural mistakes – yet they routinely are fooled. It's a similar charade with Ali G, the A-side of the shtick, with a “how stupid do these politicians think the 'hip-hop generation' actually is?” But, damn, what's with all the poop humor in this new movie? Maybe, because of my indoctrination as enlightened humanist, or my upbringing with Gallagher, I am not surprised nor scandalized by masturbation or feces, & therefore cannot be grossed-out or moved to a chuckle by gross-out stunts. If taking down Americans & exposing their prejudices is so easy, what can be learnt by bringing your own poop in a bag to the dinner table (because the foreigner didn't understand the flush)? Wouldn't anyone, not just racist Southern Christians, be dismayed? There are priceless moments – like when Borat, at a rodeo, gets the whole audience to cheer for something like “May George Bush drink the blood of every last Iraqi woman & child”; or when a cowboy tells him in confidence to shave his mustache so that he doesn't look like a Muslim terrorist. I guess I wanted more sociology & less scatology. I'm still convinced that the best movie ever made about racism is Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles, using humor to discuss gray areas of the soul that a cheesy movie like Crash can't scrape away at. Borat, with its mockumentary format & deceiving character acting, had a potential to take Blazing Saddles into a post-9/11 world, but it seemed more inspired by Mel Brooks' fart jokes than by his comic insights.