nancynall.com » Ouch.
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Ouch.

A wise man once described the cal­cu­lus he made on the sub­ject of bald­ness. On the one hand, the expense and daily bat­tle of Rogaine, toupees, glue, hair plugs, not to men­tion the social anx­i­ety of won­der­ing whether peo­ple are notic­ing, whether one has become a fig­ure of fun like Jim Traf­i­cant or, for you Hoosiers, Pat Bauer.

On the other hand, “mak­ing peace with bald­ness.” It seemed an easy choice. I agree.

So I guess we should be grate­ful, if that’s the word, that Christo­pher Hitchens did what many men are doing these days — work­ing on their appear­ance the way women do — and wrote about it.
 I guess you could call it a pub­lic ser­vice. Fix­ing the teeth, negat­ing his clas­sic smoking-Brit smile, was prob­a­bly a good idea. As for the “sack, back and crack” man-waxing, I’m reminded of my afore­men­tioned wise man. I’ve had body wax­ing and found the pain worse in antic­i­pa­tion than prac­tice, but I only waxed reg­u­lar skin. A man’s scro­tum is a dif­fer­ent kind of skin, and, well…

I had no idea it would be so excru­ci­at­ing. The com­bined effect was like being tor­tured for infor­ma­tion that you do not pos­sess, with inter­vals for a (inci­den­tally very costly) sand­pa­per hand­job. The thing is that, in order to rip, you have to grip. A point of lever­age is required; a place that can be firmly gripped and pulled while the skin is taut­ened.

The impres­sion of being a huge baby was enhanced by the bliz­zards of tal­cum pow­der that fol­lowed each sear­ing appli­ca­tion. I swear that sev­eral times [J Sis­ter waxer Janea Padilha] sooth­ingly said that I was being a brave lit­tle boy… Mean­while, every­thing in the gen­eral area was fight­ing to retract itself into my body…

All this to remove hair from one’s balls? Is this now a base­line groom­ing require­ment? I’ve changed dia­pers on both gen­ders, and con­fronted with a denuded land­scape down there — not to men­tion the smell of tal­cum pow­der — I’d prob­a­bly start won­der­ing if I had another David Vit­ter on my hands. A real woman (or man, if that’s the way you swing) doesn’t shrink from a few hairs, or even a lot of them. Bring back the nat­ural look.

It’s times like these I think, “Thank GOD I’m mar­ried.” I just can­not imag­ine dat­ing in this envi­ron­ment.

Have we low­ered the tone enough? Have we started Fri­day out on the right foot? Have I implanted images in your brain that you would hap­pily inject acid into your skull to remove? No? Then you need to check out the slide show. Not to worry — it’s safe. If you have time for only one pic­ture, try this one.

“Sand­pa­per hand­job” — that’s a great name for a band.

Blog­gage:

Howie sent me an AP ver­sion of the falling-cow story — thanks, Howie — but I have a bet­ter one. The cou­ple are locals, and one is a quote machine: “It’s rain­ing cows out here, man.”

Let’s fin­ish out YouTube week with yet another tes­ti­mony to the strange­ness of Japan­ese TV: Dogs jump­ing rope.

Have a great week­end, whether you jump rope or not.

Posted on Friday, November 9th, 2007 at 9:52 am in Popculch. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.


18 responses to
“Ouch.”

  1. John C said on November 9th, 2007 at 10:23 am

    One of my favorite Queer-Eye moments involved body wax­ing. The boys were fix­ing up by beloved and notably scruffy Red Sox. Catcher Jason Varitek was late, and arrived by a char­tered heli­copter. Varitek, for those who don’t know, is one of those straight-laced, buzz-cut, man’s man jock­ish types. Maybe it was just me, but he also seemed to be the one clos­est to being uncom­fort­able with the gay­ness that was sur­round­ing him. As he was lay­ing on the table hav­ing his back waxed, being Mr. Tough Guy as they ripped the paper off, Car­son leaned down and said: “So let me get this straight, you took a heli­copter here so you could get your back waxed?”
    Varitek: “Yep.”
    Car­son: “That’s really, really gay!”

    My favorite Hitchens line was: “I had no idea it would be so excru­ci­at­ing.” Hello? About the only idea I do have the whole thing is that it would be excru­ci­at­ing.

  2. colleen said on November 9th, 2007 at 10:37 am

    Greeeat, now I have an image of Christo­pher H’s nether regions. UGH. UGH.

    ETA: His orig­i­nal teeth were, uh, off putting. But the new ones were nice…not fakey look­ing chick­let teeth.

    Per­son­ally, I don’t get the com­plete defor­esta­tion thing.

    But yeah…thank god I’m mar­ried for sure.

  3. Danny said on November 9th, 2007 at 1:14 pm

    My favorite Hitchens line was: “I had no idea it would be so excru­ci­at­ing.” Hello? About the only idea I do have the whole thing is that it would be excru­ci­at­ing.

    Exactly, John. Incred­i­ble. Per­haps Chris has never been kicked in the nads. Too bad. It’s char­ac­ter build­ing.

    And I too do not get this whole depila­tion deal. Per­haps the Brits are like the French who don’t under­stand that tak­ing a shower, mak­ing sure to sham­poo one’s crouch, is a lot less painful.

  4. Julie Robinson said on November 9th, 2007 at 1:31 pm

    I caught part of an “America’s Got Tal­ent” with a sim­i­lar act (the jump-roping dogs, not the wax­ing). Bizarre beyond belief (the jump-roping dogs AND the wax­ing). Pluck­ing my eye­brows pro­vides plenty of pain, thank you very much.

  5. alex said on November 9th, 2007 at 1:56 pm

    I’m not into the bald balls thing, nor sure I under­stand it. It does seem to be de rigeur on the dat­ing scene, though, and I’ve been told my bush needs some agent orange by more than a few vain pricks. But what’s truly ick­ier than a scro­tum with foresta­tion is one that’s cov­ered with stub­ble.

  6. MichaelG said on November 9th, 2007 at 2:42 pm

    I wanna see waxed jump rop­ing dogs.

  7. LA mary said on November 9th, 2007 at 3:45 pm

    You wax the dog, I’ll teach him to jump rope.

  8. del said on November 9th, 2007 at 4:38 pm

    If you have time for only one pic­ture, try this one.

    D’oh!!

  9. MichaelG said on November 9th, 2007 at 4:58 pm

    I’m sure you could sell a lot of tick­ets to either event.

  10. ashley said on November 10th, 2007 at 4:19 pm

    For my vasec­tomy, I had to shave the old coin purse. Wax­ing never entered my thought process, despite my fond­ness for Brazil. The doc­tor warned me that if I didn’t do it, the nurse would do it, and there was no guar­an­tee that she would be either a) nice about it or b) female. Yeah. So I did it myself.

    And as far as stub­ble goes, yeah, it sucks. I’ve heard that a clean shave does facil­i­tate teabag­ging, though. (apolo­gies to the visual thinkers out there)

  11. michaelj said on November 11th, 2007 at 12:25 pm

    Christo­pher Hitchens onanis­tic porn strikes me as the equiv­a­lent of Repub­li­can chick­en­hawk­ism. Never used it and still didn’t lose it. This guy scores about 15 on the O’Reilley Dis­gus­tome­ter, but now he’s act­ing like the gross fat guy on CSI that wanted to suckle and be spanked for poop­ing his gigan­tic dia­pers. Intel­li­gent design? Yeah, right.

  12. brian stouder said on November 11th, 2007 at 1:53 pm

    Speak­ing of “onanis­tic porn” – I keep see­ing ads for Keith Olbermann’s Mon­day show, wherein he is going to attack Fox News (again [yawn]) for run­ning leer­ing pro­gram­ming on their later-evening pro­gram­ming.

    This bit of Olber­mann elec­tronic onanism strikes me as par­tic­u­larly self-satisfied (so to speak), given that his damned MSNBC becomes Pedophiles R Us prac­ti­cally every night, with those end­less iter­a­tions of To Catch a Preda­tor…. that is, when they aren’t doing in-depth looks at var­i­ous prison yards around the coun­try (instruct­ing us about the ins and outs about male-on-male sex amongst men who say “but I’m not gay”, and sub­jects such as the pro­jec­tion of var­i­ous boldily flu­ids and so on).

    One sup­poses that only a few tens of thou­sands of peo­ple around the whole coun­try bother to watch the pap on either MSNBC or Fox at (say) a quar­ter to mid­night on a weeknight…and despite the fact that I very much pre­fer MSNBC over Fox, one can­not help but admire Fox’s frank­ness (or shame­less­ness) in pur­suit of rat­ings points, instead of Olbermann’s brand of apple-polishing self-serving preen­ing.

    One recalls that a month ago or so, MSNBC’s Tucker Carl­son proudly recounted round­ing up a few friends to help him phys­i­cally assault another fel­low, who Tucker thought had made a sex­ual advance toward him! Did this (at the very least) get Tucker named “Worse (or “Worser”, or “WORST”) Per­son in the World”? by the Kei­th­ster?

    Nope.

    Did Dan Abrams play that egre­gous video for his (in this case appro­pri­ately named) Beat the Press?

    Nope.

    In fact, Abrams was on the show where his employee Carl­son made his laugh­ing boast about being vio­lently homophobic….and he laughed right along!! And of course, Abrams rarely misses a chance to beat on Fox News on his pro­gram, just as the Kieth­ster does. (and by the way – isn’t the con­trived con­cept of Count­down a joke? They say they count­down the 5 most impor­tant sto­ries of the day – but they’ll have 3 or 4 Story Fives, and a like num­ber or Fours and Threes….and since it IS still a news show after­all, and since a count­DOWN has to start high and go down, the most impor­tant sto­ries are always “Fives” (at the begin­ning of the show), and Brit­tney Spears (et al) has been Keith’s #1 story prob­a­bly 347 times!!

    I appre­ci­ate (and enjoy) MSNBC’s world­view, espe­cially in the way that it dif­fers from market-leader Fox. But that network’s self-righteousness (vis-vis Fox) is as dis­taste­ful as it is base­less.

  13. michaelj said on November 11th, 2007 at 9:24 pm

    Wee Tucker is the alle­gor­i­cal tam­pon Prince Charles wished he were, except it’s only the bowtie that would lead any­body to believe he’d been there.

    Olber­mann is actu­ally on at 8p. He cer­tainly gets a kick out of mock­ing FauxNews, but these are the aholes that ran the Swift­boat slan­der about 300 times a day and claimed it was news and not slan­der. Unfor­tu­nately, there are about a tenth of a bil­lion peo­ple that view Fox as reli­gious div­ina­tion. By the vagaries of our Con­sti­tu­tion, these idiots get to vote. It’d be won­der­ful were H.L. Mencken around to offer obser­va­tions on his puta­tive booboisee.

    Spin­mas­ter O touts his own verac­ity when he lies, lies, lies. An accu­rate account of his men­dac­ity would use up Nan­cy­Nalls’ band­width. Keith may be smug, but call­ing Shrub and the party organ (so to speak, I mean, they are cer­tainly dick­heads) liars isn’t onanis­tic so much as it’s flog­ging a dead…horse…with a falafel.

  14. michaelj said on November 11th, 2007 at 9:35 pm

    As far as Worst Per­son, there are so many aholes and so few days in the week. Mr. Diebold that guar­an­teed a Shrub win in Ohio and then saw 25thou votes from San­dusky Co. van­ish into the ether wasn’t ever a win­ner, but I’d imag­ine Olber­mann thinks he reg­is­ters way below despi­ca­ble.

    At least once, Olber­mann named him­self a Worst Per­son, when he’d got­ten some insignif­i­cant facts wrong in the Worst Per­son sweeps. He’s really not the guy tak­ing him­self too seri­ously. There are sex­ual offend­ers and hillbilly-heroin junkies spout­ing a cor­rupt party line on air­waves that y’all own. It’s nice when some­one poindts it out.

  15. MaryC said on November 12th, 2007 at 12:56 am

    I can see the point of get­ting your teeth fixed, since it’s one fea­ture that every­one sees. But why the wax (other than hav­ing a tit­il­lat­ing sub­ject to write about which I sup­pose was the point all along)? Who except Mrs. Hitchens and maybe the guys at the steam bath would even know?

    And — sorry, this may be TMI – I have to say that the real agony is not the wax­ing, it’s the ingrown hairs. Believe me, Hitch’s ordeal is just start­ing

  16. harry near indy said on November 12th, 2007 at 12:27 pm

    nancy, if you’re going to mock pat bauer for his hair faux pas, be bipar­ti­san at least and mock your ex-gov, mitch daniels.

    i’ve never seen a part in a man’s hair start right above his ear­lobe — until then.

    plus, daniels is an obnox­ious ass­hole.

  17. LA mary said on November 12th, 2007 at 1:35 pm

    Per­son­ally, I love pho­tos of guys with hor­ri­ble rugs. Traficant’s is a clas­sic, but I hadn’t seen Bauer before. Very nice.

  18. MaryC said on November 12th, 2007 at 2:35 pm

    Per­son­ally, I love pho­tos of guys with hor­ri­ble rugs

    There are bad hor­ri­ble rugs and good hor­ri­ble rugs. A bad hor­ri­ble rug, like William Shatner’s, cringes flat on the top of the guy’s head try­ing to pass itself off as real and hop­ing no-one will notice the join. A good hor­ri­ble rug dares to flaunt itself shame­lessly — “I’m fake and I’m spec­tac­u­lar!”

    I’ve always been par­tial to the bouf­fant pouf of my fel­low Cana­dian Garth Dra­bin­sky, the­atri­cal entre­pre­neur and fugi­tive from the U.S. courts, seen here in all its glory. If you have to have fake hair, why not have as much fake hair as you can?

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