Oh, Thankth Thithter!

No, this isn't a blog about people who talk like Cindy Brady. I just can't seem to think of the word "sister" without then thinking of little Ronny Howard as Winthrop in "The Music Man."

My sister has been having a hair crisis lately. Well, she says lately, I say for a long time, ever since she started coloring it way too much and letting it grow. But that's a difference of hair opinion, and I realize hair is a very personal thing and that we shall never agree in that particular area.

Anyway, her Big Day, ie Haircut Day, was yesterday, and so for a few weeks she's been scouring every haircut book she can get her hands on. You know those haircut books. Magazines with picture after picture of semi-halfway-almost professional looking models with every imaginable haircut in the Free Fucking World. And a lot of them are really, really bad haircuts. And that makes me laugh.

Yesterday at lunchtime The Sister thrust her latest copy of Haircut World or Happy Hair or Hair Today (Gone Tomorrow) or whatever it was called into my hands to show me a couple of styles she liked. This was, of course, a complete waste of time, because anything she likes I'm bound not to like, and anything I like she immediately says her hair will just "not do." But I looked anyway, while The Sister proceeded to take a phone call.

And so I looked through the book. And I began to giggle. And then I began to laugh outright, and by the end of it all I was practically in tears.

This Hair Book cracked me absolutely up.

I started giggling right off the bat at the models. I don't know where they got some of these women, and God knows, with the mug I carry around I have no right to judge, but Holy Jesus. A few of them I had to take second looks at because I first thought they were men. Female impersonators sporting the latest in Weird New York Gay Disco hair. One model looked just like a girl who used to work with me, complete with Osmond-sized teeth. One looked like she'd forgotten to wash her face that morning. And then, some of them were just downright ugly. But they can't help that, and neither can we, and so we'll just let them be. I mean, who am I to judge? They got professional modeling gigs and I'm sitting here alone in my pajamas writing blogs. Unpaid.

Then I got to that other girl. She wasn't a bad looking girl, and I must admit she had a rather nice haircut, at least for one of those Hair Magazines, but she had a wonky eye. I mean, she had an eye that was so wonky she was looking at me with one eye and at the woman on the page facing her with the other. It was more than a little disconcerting.

And I giggled some more.

The haircuts ran the gamut, from the "I Cut My Own Bangs in the Dark" kind to the "The Back of My Head Looks Like the Ass-end of a White-Tailed Deer" kind. To the "Oooh, You Used Hedgecutters" kind. To the "Someone Threw Lit Matches At My Hair And a Fair Amount of Them Landed on Their Mark" kind. To the "My Hairdresser Forgot To Color Over Half of My Hair" kind, to the one called "Nights of City Lights in Paris" that wasn't so much nights in Paris as it was "Driving Along I-77 in a Convertible Without a Scarf."

But oddly enough, the thing that had me haw-hawing and slapping my knee had nothing to do with goofy hair or big teeth or female impersonating or wonky eyes. It was an ad.

It was an ad for some kind of weight-loss product, couldn't tell you what it was called, but it was a full-page ad that proclaimed in orange letters along the top, "How My Sister's Weight Loss Secret Worked For Me!" Then there was a little story underneath all about how some girl found out what her sister was doing to make the scale numbers go down and down and down.

It was accompanied by this picture.

Ahhh, so that's how she does it, that crafty sister of hers! She just gets on the scale and only lets her tippy toes touch it! And here all this time, for over two solid years, I've been standing there full flush on the pad like the beached whale I am and grimacing in pain at the numbers that pop up. Well, I guess I won't be doing that any longer!

Sister Number Two also apparently doesn't wear her glasses early in the morning, because look how she has to hunch herself all over into a ball to see the numbers going down and down and down. And I'm not even sure where to start on the fact that her scale is striped, and that blue stripe there at the end extends all the way out onto her floor. That's some cosmic scale.

So I can't wait till tomorrow. I'm going to pop right out of bed, leave off my glasses, put on my best red panties, put my toes on the scale, and get ready to hunch. I'm sure I won't be as happy as this sister here, considering she's a small girl anyway and with only the toes applied and all, her scale probably registers her at about four pounds. But it's certainly worth a try.

It's worth more of a try than any of those haircuts I saw yesterday, anyway.

Betland's Olympic Update:
* The Hucklebug podcast is up, running, and ready to be enjoyed. Click here to listen on the web, or subscribe via iTunes.
* If you'd like, you can go here and take a test to find out how southern your speech is. They use the whole "Yankee or Rebel" thing, but I prefer not to do that, and so I won't. So there. I was 78% southern, by the way.