Tag Archives: style

Adorable Cat Journalists, Silly Olympics Links and a Tornado Map

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A few totally frivolous links, plus a few more thought-provoking ones for you folks today:

These 40 things will make you feel old, apparently. Many kids today have never seen a floppy disk, nor have they heard the sound of the wild modem, howling in the night for the blood of your MIDI sound files. Or whatever it is modems howl for; I never did figure that one out.

The Five Stages of Awkward Hair Grief

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Be afraid. Be very afraid, because once again, I am bored with my hair.

I am so bored that when a nice girl at the salon suggested I try a Mohawk, I actually considered it for about .04 seconds.

How bored do you have to be to want an incredibly high-maintenance, attention-drawing haircut that’s really only appropriate for punks and people trying to make a statement about the post-punk lifestyle?

You have to be really bored.

But don’t worry. I didn’t actually get a Mohawk. I didn’t even have the hairdressers dye the whole thing blue, which actually looked good on me for the month I kept it that way in college. Then it began to fade, as did the novelty of telling small children I had eaten a Smurf, so I switched to auburn.

The problem with constantly being bored with your hair is that you keep changing it, which means you spend an awful lot of time in that indeterminate state where you don’t really have any kind of coherent haircut or style.

If I were trying to make a statement about my hair that would probably bother me a lot. But the only statement I want to make with my hair is “Hey, I have hair! You don’t have to look at my giant lumpy noggin!”

Unfortunately, you will have to look at my weird haircuts, because I have a hard time finding giant lumpy hats. And I will be going through the five stages of awkward hair grief:

  • Denial. My hair doesn’t really look like that, does it? Nah. It looks fine, it’s just the weird lighting and tachyon particles hitting the mirror, like on Star Trek.
  • Anger. Why in the name of all that is hairy did I get bangs? What was I thinking? I look like Justin Bieber on crack! Someone must pay for this!
  • Bargaining. Let me just hold on long enough to get it trimmed this month. I’ll do anything for a few more inches, or just to get that weird cowlick to stop sticking straight up. It’s only a matter of time ‘til it grows out enough to be a real haircut, right? Right?
  • Depression. I’ll just stay inside. Or wear a hat. For the rest of my life. I can’t go on with this terrible hair! What’s the point?
  • Acceptance. It’s going to be okay. Hey, it could be worse. I could be completely bald, and then I wouldn’t have any problems with my hair at all.

… hey, anybody got a razor and some shaving cream?

Unfantastic Plastic

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I had an interesting discussion the other day with a guy about plastic surgery.

I mentioned the famous women who are generally considered “the most beautiful,” whatever that really means. Nicole Kidman, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Scarlett Johansson. He added Angelina Jolie to the list, and I’m pretty sure I’m forgetting a few of the girls.

But then he wondered how many of them have had plastic surgery. I said I couldn’t recall that any of those particular ladies had, but that you could often tell who had and who hadn’t.

This was apparently news to him.

It’s not that I go around looking for the signs of plastic surgery. I don’t. It’s just that I really like style and often check galleries of red carpet events to see what everyone’s wearing. And many of those outfits are fairly revealing. This means I have seen an awful lot of unconvincing bosoms, even though I am definitely not looking for them. Here’s a hint, boys: If they don’t sag a bit when you’re standing up, they’re not real.

A giveaway for liposuction: your belly is weirdly lumpy, like a bowl full of oatmeal with raisins. Tara Reid, for example.

And then there’s the lips. If your lips haven’t been stuffed with collagen, the top one is generally going to be smaller than the bottom one. There are a few exceptions. Lisa Rinna would be an example of lips gone horribly wrong, although for some reason, plenty of people actually like this creepy look.

Style at the Emmys

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Of course, what I love about the Emmys is the clothes. Sometimes I love to hate them.

Feathers seem to be featured this year, but I can never see them without  thinking one of two things: 1. Which Las Vegas showgirl did you mug to get that outfit? 2. You b******s, you skinned Big Bird!

Christina Hendricks, the most beautiful woman on the planet, had a minor fashion misstep. This is not her color. This is not her style of dress. This is not her hairstyle. Most importantly, these are not her poofy sleeves.  It says a lot for Christina that she looked drop-dead gorgeous anyway.

Holly Burrell wore some pink and black thing. I don’t know if that’s part of her dress, an ugly stole, or if a spraypainted varmint attacked her on the way in from the parking lot.

On the bright side: Elisabeth Moss, Kim Kardashian and Sofia Vergara.

Shop Til You Drop

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I’m not one of those girls who likes shopping. I don’t relish picking out clothes from a rack, I don’t enjoy bringing everything to the try-on rooms and I especially don’t enjoy actually trying everything on.

Part of it is that I’m not a size 4. Part of it, though, is that nothing ever seems to fit right, even when it is the right size, and if it does, it either doesn’t have pockets (pants) or is horribly short (dress) or the neckline goes down to the navel (shirts). Most of my shopping trips end in muttered rants against the fashion industry, which by the end of the trip I usually believe hates women.

Unfortunately, my family is having three weddings this summer, and I need to find a dress. At least one dress. Preferably two.

The good news is, my mother is going to join me in shopping. Misery loves company, after all.

I already promised I’d at least try to be good.

Revealing Swimming Suits

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I have not worn a two-piece swimsuit since I was about 4. It was a pink bikini with little black polka dots, and I can’t remember liking it or hating it; it allowed me to swim, and apart from that, I probably didn’t care.

Now I’m the proud owner of the first two-piece swimming suit I’ve had in more than 20 years, shown at left. Yes, that’s a swimming suit, and yes, it has two pieces. It’s one of those newfangled tankinis.

It’s very difficult to find swimming suits if you’re not a size zero, and these days, tankinis seem to be most of what’s on sale. They’re two pieces, which allows you to mix and match tops and bottoms, but they look like one piece swimsuits and cover your belly.

Sort of.

If I bought swimming suits to try to look decorative while lying on the beach, my priorities in swimsuit purchases would probably change. However, I buy swimming suits to swim in them, and thus, I like a nice high neckline and legholes that aren’t high cut. They have tankinis in all kinds of different styles and I was able to find a high necked top and a pair of shorts-like bottoms.

The tanktop has two parts; the pretty outer part and a sort of bandeau-thing inside that fits like I imagine a bikini top would (since I don’t remember how the pink bikini felt anymore).

That’s because when you swim in a tankini, the outside part sort of floats around. It feels very strange and I’m very glad the people at the YMCA are non-judgmental, because they probably thought I was crazy when I swam in it the first time. I kept having to surface and pause to giggle. It feels like swimming in your clothes, but without the excess weight, and it had almost a tickly sensation as the extra fabric from the outer layer floated around you.

This may be how jellyfish feel on a daily basis.

The tankini top just floats around you (with the inner bandeau making sure nobody sees anything important) and here’s the critical part: even if you aren’t actually showing that much tummy, it feels like the whole thing is exposed the whole time.

If you are self-conscious about your belly, you should probably stick to a good old-fashioned one-piece swimsuit.

Big Girls in the New York Times

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Apparently, "You don’t put a big girl in a big dress."

I’m not going to dispute that, because I’m not a fashion photographer or a fashion anything, but what I’m wondering is, when did lovely Christina Hendricks (5’7", statuesque, and pictured at left) become a "big girl"?

Only in Hollywood could somebody who looks like that even be considered "big." Most of us would kill or at least maim to look like Hendricks, who stars in the popular TV show "Mad Men."

The question is, did the New York Times, where a columnist stated "You don’t put a big girl in a big dress," back up the assertion by deliberately stretching a photo of Hendricks horizontally so that she looked wider? This is a controversial question.

The photo was definitely run out of proportion, but it may easily have been an accident, because there are plenty of lazy shortcuts you can take in most layout programs that size photos to fit the space, which is often quicker than sizing the space to fit the photo and then putting the article on the page all over again. Or maybe someone thought it would be funny to make the gorgeous Hendricks look wider to fit the column better. I can’t say.

But what’s really wrong to me seems to be the columnist’s blithe assertion that Hendricks was a "big girl" in the first place.

Apparently our definition of beauty has now become so narrow that even a big-chested, small-waisted woman is just a "big girl."

The First Grey Hair

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I went for a swim at the YMCA today, and while I was fixing my hair afterward, I spied an unusually glossy hair.

Upon closer examination, I discovered the hair wasn’t just unusually glossy. Nope. It was grey, or to be actually accurate, it was a pretty, shiny, silvery color.

I have a grey hair.

Now, while many people view going grey as a calamity, I’ve actually been looking forward to it a little bit. Of my family members who have gone grey, at least one of them ended up with much, much prettier hair after it had gone grey than they’d had before. Everyone else in my family looks just as good grey, or maybe slightly better.

So the way I figure it, I have chance of looking either A. pretty much the same or B. much, much better.

I forget that most people don’t feel that way, so I was a little surprised when my coworkers asked me if I’d plucked it.

"Of course not," I said. "It’s shiny."

Both of them looked at me and grinned.

"You’re your own shiny thing now!"

Your Geekdom Come

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Here’s a clever Christmas breakfast idea for those of us who like math or just strange objects: the mathematically correct bagel, a bagel cut into two precisely interlocking pieces. If you have kids or math/engineering/science geeks in your house, this will be a huge hit, though it looks like you’ll need to practice it once or twice to get it right.

If you’re more old school and a gamer, try out this Nintendo controller soap, fashioned with a A, B, Select and Start button, just like the chunky, rectangular objects of our painfully unergonomic youth. Ah, the ache of nostalgia! But in this case, cleanliness is the best policy.

The Star Wars Christmas Special has become pretty infamous over the years, and they’re even going to screen it in Minneapolis Wednesday, but you might be better off buying these R2D2 lights, or even these Yoda lights.

Finally, for the girl geeks out there, today I offer you the Undressed Year in Review: bad celebrity fashions, including high waisted jeans and Renee Zellweger wearing a ridiculous transparent blouse. Also Cate Blanchett appears to have skinned somebody’s grandmother’s couch. (It’s about 7-8 pictures in.)

GaGa for Lady GaGa?

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I bought Lady GaGa’s 2008 CD because 1. It has annoyingly catchy tunes and 2. It perfectly embodied Soren Kierkegaard’s aesthetic mode as detailed in "Either/Or" (no, I’m not kidding).

When I listened to it, though, I noticed she is actually talented and could probably sing non-poppy, tuneful music if she wanted to make a lot less money.

Here’s proof: a girl named Stefani Germanotta singing and playing the piano in a contest, or Lady GaGa before she got famous and learned she did not need pants. Without all that synthetic crap, she has a lovely, strong voice.

I am also not kidding about pants. While she’s known as a style icon, for her wacky and bizarre costumes and weird platinum wigs, she tends to wear not much of anything that isn’t shaped like underwear on her lower half. You’re warned, so here’s a photo gallery of La GaGa’s style, just so you can see what I’m talking about.

Evidently pantslessness is a way of life.