Bad hair week

OK, I admit it. I have a hidden agenda. Although of course it is no longer hidden, now that I am telling you all about it. The agenda, or long-term goal, of this blog is to understand life, the universe and everything (and if you don't recognize that quote please check out Douglas Adams' work). And I propose to do so by examining the world around me, and try to reach appropriate generalizations/recognize patterns where I can. The general framework for this examination is the input (perception) - processing (analyzing) - output (conclusion) cycle that I must have mentioned in some earlier entry.

Attentive readers will by now have started wondering how the heck this is supposed to connect with the title of this entry ("bad hair week"). But never fear, there is always a connection. And it is not even a six-degrees-of-separation (or the Kevin-Bacon game) type of connection. It is very simple, and obvious (to me, at least).

All last week, I walked around with phenomenously bad hair. I have no idea how or why this happened, although I am not ruling out a combination of a freak growth event (it suddenly seems to be much longer than it was only a week ago), the change in the weather, and the fact that some days ago, I took a nap right after having washed my hair. But that is not the point. (If it were, I would probably refer to Stanislaw Lem's "The chain of chance", but it's not, and I won't) The point is that it made me look a bit like Boris Johnson (the mayor of London).

And the problem with that is that I really don't want to look like Boris Johnson, because of his reputation of speaking his mind without regard to the consequences. Now I am not saying he is the idiot some journalists make him out to be - I am quite sure the media milk each of his bloopers for what they're worth - but the point is that I do not want to look like him, because of the risk of "guilt by association".

Which brings me back to my no-longer-much-of-a-secret agenda, namely that one bad hair week can be used to demonstrate not just one but two of the ailments that we all suffer from. The first is the way our brain can link up two completely disparate issues such as "Boris Johnson hair" and stupidity, and act as if there were a causal relationship between the two, and the second is how perception can be more important that reality.

Recently, I mentioned this preoccupation of mine to an Englishman, who looked at me for a moment then said that in his opinion, I didn't look like Boris Johnson at all, but that I reminded him of Greg Norman, the Australian golf legend who also goes by the name of "Great White Shark". Obviously, this made me very happy (especially after I checked him out on the Internet).

Last note on this: my wife says it doesn't matter who I look like, I need a haircut.