Annual Beard Selfie:
Beard is growing in well and I intend to go two more months without touching it and go full mountain man. I hate that I look like a Trump voter (the car selfie in shades does not help), but I think I might just get a big pride pin for my overalls to offset it and stay THE FUCK AWAY from red hats. Not that they make hats in that size.
I told you all what my drill sergeant said in basic training, right? “Holy Cow Private Cole- your head is so big if you was a cowboy you’d need a twelve gallon hat.”
Drill Sergeants are the funniest human beings on the planet.
*** UPDATE ***
IT LOOKS EVEN FUCKING BIGGER INDOORS
I guess because there are no trees or mountains to fucking distort people’s perception of scale. Also why do I look like I am on pcp?
Sister Golden Bear
At least you’re not wearing wrap-around sunglasses. So you can take solace in that.
If you get the Pride pin, be sure to be on the look out for bears. /
Oh and, first!
Baud
I’m not ready for Christmas.
Alison Rose
Just carry a Trader Joe’s tote bag with you everywhere, then they’ll know you’re not one of them. Or get a blue hat that says “Brandon kicked Trump’s ass”.
Jim Vandewalker
Drill Sergeants are the funniest human beings on the planet.
Can confirm.
Currants
😂 my word you look SO much like my brother and nephew!!
The Lodger
Hey, it’s *hard* not to laugh at something funny when you’re standing at attention.
Starfish
@Baud: It’s okay. You don’t have to sit in Santa Cole’s lap.
Another Scott
Stylin’
Today I got my 3rd haircut this year – whether I needed it or not.
(I kinda needed it.)
Here’s hoping I avoided the Covid and the flu and the RSV and all the rest in the time I was unmasked…
You could always get a red Make Black Lives Matter hat. Or variation thereon.
Cheers,
Scott.
Sister Golden Bear
Maybe you just need to move to San Francisco…
steppy
We call a good friend of mine “One-peg” for his fit on a trucker cap. Just more space for a big giant brain to reside.
Nancy
@Alison Rose:
Rock on.
ian
Not sure that the posted pictures look like you are on pcp. Do you have any of you freaking out? Seeing those is the only way your commentariat can judge properly.
Danielx
Would fit right in at a MAGA rally, especially with the permanently-pissed-off expression.
steppy
PCP because your Rx must be -7 like mine was before LASIK. Not bad but it tends to make the eyes look beady.
Ohio Mom
I have two very cute red wool hats. One looks like the hat Robin Hood wore, I try wearing it every now and then but I’m not really comfortable with red on my head anymore. The other is a baseball cap and I’m definitely never wearing it again.
I feel cheated. I know, it’s minor compared to everything else Trump took from us.
Nancy
Ummm,
I appear to be in the minority here. I disagree with your negative appearance assessment. You look OK.
Anne Laurie
You don’t, of course, but you wish you did.
Yutsano
@Sister Golden Bear: Okay so maaaaaybe I had to go back and watch the whole thing… :P
@SpaceUnit: But coal is still dead right?
SpaceUnit
I’ve spent a lot of time in WV. You will blend in well there per our sinister plan.
Steve in the ATL
@Nancy: Jesus Christ woman you need to sober up!
Anne Laurie
You can almost certainly overdye the wool hat pretty easily — with a strong coffee solution, if you don’t wanna get ‘crafty’. The baseball cap, well — there are amazing fabric paints available these days; you could always decorate it with pearlescent rainbows!
Sanjeevs
Bob Mortimer’s nickname for a guy with a big head was ‘Sniper’s Dream’.
Ohio Mom
Maybe the PCP look is because your eyes are two different colors? The reflection of the computer screens on your glasses makes the eye on the left (your right eye) lighter than the other.
SpaceUnit
@Yutsano:
Chemically yes. Politically no.
UncleEbeneezer
@Sister Golden Bear: I just visited an optometrist after years of none and learned that I really need to wear sunglasses more during my tennis lessons to protect against a type of UV damage that has significant risk for people with blue eyes. Shopping around for reasonably priced sunglasses with broad UV protection it’s depressing how many of them are those hideous, wrap-around BlueLivesMatter/Insurrection glasses.
Ohio Mom
@Anne Laurie: Thanks for these ideas. I think I will look for some YouTube’s on dying red hats. As long as I don’t shrink it in hot water, ought to be doable.
Suzanne
Cole, you should carry this tote bag with you.
Suzanne
And you look like you’re on PCP because you look kind of red and flushed in that picture. Maybe it’s just the light? If not, some skincare is in order…..go get a facial and do a moisturizing mask at home. And wear sunblock. YOU HAVE TO TAKE CARE OF YOUR SKIN.
UncleEbeneezer
Was just listening to this great Marc Maron interview with Henry Louis Gates. Really interesting hearing about his experience growing up in W. Virginia (Cole, you might wanna check it out) but then almost had to vomit when he said he doesn’t judge his Yale/Harvard friends who voted for Trump because he doesn’t know what’s in his heart and because Cancel Culture is just as bad as Right Wing school boards banning Toni Morrison. Gag…🤮
Uncle Cosmo
How about a MAKE ATTORNEYS GET ATTORNEYS hat?
Anoniminous
@Anne Laurie:
@Ohio Mom:
Tip: you can over dye woolen goods using Kool-Aid. Works for any protein: mohair, angora, human hair, & so on
Suzanne
@Ohio Mom: I saw these hats for sale outside the African American Museum of History and Culture. I would def wear this red hat.
different-church-lady
Because it’s a bad-ass look, especially with the shades.
Splitting Image
Man, whoever said that a squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous never saw that head. I conclude that your drill sergeant isn’t the guy who said that.
zhena gogolia
@UncleEbeneezer: Wow. I guess PBS has that effect on people.
HinTN
@Another Scott: For my retirement, playing on the fact that everyone knew I was the token liberal in the office (at least the only out, and out proud liberal), a recently de-Trumpified retiree gave me a MAGA (My Attorney Got Arrested) cap. It might fit that melon. 😎
schrodingers_cat
PCP? Primary Care Physician? Google says some hallucinogen. I had no idea. Obviously I have lead a sheltered life.
BigJimSlade
Here’s my thanksgiving update: we had filet mignon yesterday (at mom’s request), and today we went to the store and bought an 11-pound turkey for $5 :-)
eclare
@BigJimSlade: Awesome!
Jager
@Jim Vandewalker:
I was a squad leader in basic training, I had an assistant, I.B., and I were running a review of training low crawl drill one afternoon. I.B. said to a chubby kid hung up on the wire, “What I wanna know, is why you brought your mama’s ass to basic with you?” Sgt McGinnis broke up and he had to walk away. He later recommended I.B. for the NCO academy.
Our first Sgt called a kid out of morning formation. Pvt K was a massive fuck up. Sgt Burton gets in his face and says, “K you are going on sick call this morning.” The kid says “Why?” Sgt Burton smiled and said, “The doctors are going to put a window in your stomach because your head is so far up your ass, you need a window to see where you’re going.” He then looked over Pvt K’s head, glared at our entire company, and dared anybody to laugh much less smile.
p.a.
Did they have to special order your lacrosse helmet?
Betsy
Uncle E and Suzanne are so right.
Stay out of the sun. Stay out of the sun.
If y’all knew what skin cancer has done to my dad, you would stay the f*** out of the sun.
@UncleEbeneezer:
@Suzanne:
Citizen Alan
@Danielx: No he doesn’t. There is a clear spark of intelligence in those eyes that you’d never see in the bovine expressions of MAGA trash.
Don K
@UncleEbeneezer:
Maybe that’s my problem. I have blue eyes and when I go inside after being out on a sunny day I’m blind for a few minutes. I wear shades (have worn prescription shades since I got my driver’s license at 17), but maybe I need more.
John, I’m rocking a beard that’s around 4 inches long now, and I don’t give a fuck what anyone thinks about whose side I’m on. You do you and fuck the rest of the world.
And yeah, I can sympathize with having a large cranium. On the rare occasion I’ve wanted to buy a hat I’ve never been able to find one that really fits. Just feel superior to the poor twerps who don’t have your awesome brain power inside that big skull.
raven
@Danielx: Man there was one of those down at the docks when I came in from my fishing trip. Dude must not have liked the diversity in evidence at Harborwalk!
Origuy
Since this is a hat thread, I got a new accessory today. When I was in Moscow in 2013, I bought a souvenir ushanka, one of those big (fake) fur hats. It came with your choice of pins, either a Soviet red star or an Imperial Russian eagle. I got the eagle because everybody thought the Russian Empire was in the past, right? So today I got a pin to replace it, a blue and yellow Ukrainian tryzub.
Suzanne
@Betsy: I have a family history of skin cancer, too. Take care of your skin, people! Wear hats and hoods and sunglasses and sunblock!
Yes, the Unabomber is my fashion icon.
M. Bouffant
My hat size is 7 & 5/8, but it seems proportionate to my body..
Supposedly having a big head, like a caricature, makes one look good on telebision. This is allegedly why Merv Griffin chose Vanna White for Wheel of Fortune.
LeftCoastYankee
As someone with a similar size head (and whose beard grows mostly sideways, accenting the melon-tude), maybe some giant Elton John glasses are the way to go.
Probably help with the WV MAGA F-Off factor too….
sab
I am glad Cole has a respextable beard. My husband finally got rid of his goatee. At his age (70) it just made him look MAGA.
He has another incipient skin cancer, this one on his ear. Might lose a chunk of it. He is horrified. His punk son and DIL think that would look cool. Tastes obviously vary.
sab
@Suzanne: At least you are out of Arizona. When I moved back to Ohio from Nevada in my late forties I hoped my eyes would rehydrate and I would not need reading glasses anymore. No such luck, but at least I can go out in the daytime for more than fifteen minutes without looking like I’d sat in a toaster oven.
dnfree
@Suzanne:
My husband is fair-skinned and always wore ball caps (and sun block since that became a thing). Now he’s had skin cancers on the tops of both ears. Those hats with the side flaps might look dorky, but you really don’t want MOHS surgery on the tops of your ears.
TS
@dnfree:
My Dad had ears that looked like they had been nibbled all over. He also ended up with a concave shape in the back of his head. He really liked that one – said everyone could recognize him from the back. All because of skin cancers – and he wore broad brimmed hats most of his life.
Redshift
Greetings from a fellow member of the Big Head Society!
JustRuss
The pic with the shades has a bit of John Goodman-in-Lebowski vibe to it. Not a bad look.
I do sympathize, I grew a goatee a few months ago and have that old-MAGA-dude look. Whatever, keeps my neck and chin warm. I like to hike with a bright hat on, got a nice red one in 2015 and haven’t worn it in years thanks to fucking-he-who-shall-not-be-named.
Steeplejack
@sab:
I shaved off my goatee (kept the mustache) specifically to lessen resting MAGA face. Dunno how successful I was. Feel like I still get wary looks from store clerks.
sab
@Steeplejack: I liked the goatee. I thought it was a good choice until I saw the fellow travellers.
He asked my opinion before he shaved it and I waffled. Not my role to make such decisions. He can opine on my haircut because it doesn’t label our politics for the world.
BeautifulPlumage
My forehead hurts just looking at the ridges in yours. Ever since COVID, I’ll randomly realize my face is scrunched up and it takes a concerted effort to relax it.
HumboldtBlue
Well, it’s hair on your face.
frosty
Suzanne
@sab: @dnfree: My grandfather went bald, and he was good about wearing hats and sunblock on top of his head, but forgot about the earlobes. He had a mole on one and it turned into melanoma. Had to have a chock of his ear removed. My FIL was diagnosed with melanoma on top of his head last year. Bad about hats! Gotta protect the skin.
Even aside from sun exposure, red skin often means something isn’t right, either an allergic reaction or dryness or irritation or a rash.
frosty
@Suzanne:
Here’s my source for UPF50 hats; certified by the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency. That oughta be good enough!
//connerhats.com/
I’ve got two of these:
https://connerhats.com/products/hiker-bucket-hat
and a hat jack to stretch them every now and then when they shrink (like every hat I’ve owned).
frosty
@frosty:
Deleted
BruceFromOhio
Always good to see you, JGC.
It’s a West VA thing, if you have to explain it, people don’t understand.
Benw
You’re rocking it to the tip top.
sab
@Suzanne: I grew up in Florida with pathologist father and I am nuts about skin cancer. Husband not so much. Regardless, all the damage was done when we were ignorant tykes.
Freckled people should act like they are vampires. Sun will kill you. Saw a black comedian on tv and she was right: All you back-to-where you-came-from people: there is a reason Britain is always cloudy.
ETA I know you are Italian so doesn’t apply to you.
Other MJS
Separated at birth?
Nancy
@Steve in the ATL:
Totally straight and sober, vision corrected to 20/40.
A sort of Robert Duvall, Second Hand Lion, vibe going on with Mr. Cole.
RandomMonster
You know Cole if I broke down on a bumfuck mountain road I sure as fuck hope you were the dude who came across me.
TriassicSands
The sure as hell weren’t in the sixties. Not mine at least.
@Suzanne:
Hey, watch it. I do have a subscription to the New Yorker.
J R in WV
@Betsy:
My dad was a sun worshipper — wore a tiny bathing suit to mow a V large lawn all his life, laid in the sun with his dad, my granddad, who also loved sweating in the sunshine. Not me! Shade or in the basement.
By the time his skin cancers had blossomed, he saw a Dermatologist every 90 days, who took care of the little fiddly bits, but then sent him to a plastic surgeon for the larger incipient melanomas.
I would drive up to dad’s place, pick him up to drive to the plastic surgeon’s office over towards Lewisburg, where he would come out with half a dozen pressure bandages taped to his incisions. He would be groggy for the drive home, I would pick up takeout dinner and get him situated to recover.
Dad looked like a retired knife fighter eventually. I avoided the sun to the maximum extent possible.
ETA: So far I have no sign of any melanoma skin cancer!
JoyceH
@Origuy:
I have one of those with a US Navy officer’s device on it, the same ones that were on our regulation covers. Don’t know if it’s still the case, but back in My Day, those hats were authorized extreme weather headgear.
David 🦃The Establishment🥧 Koch
Cole looks like one of the villains in a Dirty Harry flick
opiejeanne
@BeautifulPlumage: I have noticed since Covid that my shoulders are scrunched up near my ears a lot of the time and I have to make a conscious effort to relax them.
Nancy
I still think you look OK. I don’t like my selfies either.
The expression assumed by a person staring at their phone does not truly capture the self they present to the world or to those with whom they wish to interact–as opposed to those who literally run into them in a supermarket.
You have provided amusement to many jackals with this annual gesture so there is that.
HeartlandLiberal
At least you can grow a decent beard. I cannot. Family lore was always a great-great-grandmother was full Amerindian. In 2015, wife and I did National Geographic Genome Project. And, Lo! My DNA came back with a percentage exactly matching what to expect from a single ancestor of that degree!
HeartlandLiberal
@Ohio Mom: I worked for Indiana University Bloomington for 25 years, last 15 before retirement as IT Director at Athletics. (Yes, I knew Bobby Knight.) Imagine how many RED CAPS I have! At least they all say IU or Indiana. I still wear them.
oatler
That truck-shot reminds me of Trae Crowder’s Liberal Redneck videos.
evodevo
@M. Bouffant: Yeah…sometimes I notice, especially on tv news pundits, the relative size of their heads compared to their shoulder width…Al Sharpton comes to mind, Bill Maher, Leo DeCaprio, Julia Louis Dreyfus and some of the woman newscasters.
TheronWare
My drill sergeant had a saying – “If you had a bigger head, you’d be a bigger fool and If you had two heads you’d be two fools!”
WaterGirl
@Anoniminous:
Oh, that’s not scary at all. Kids are still drinking that. Yikes.
Miss Bianca
@Suzanne:
Don’t I know it! Finally stopped dying my hair about six months before COVID hit. Then with the lockdown and all, no hair dying either. Finally decided to do it again in summer 2021 because of a part I was playing. Was puzzled at the red crusty scabs that formed on the top of my ears. Didn’t make a connection till the third time I dyed my hair – OH, SHIT, I AM NOW ALLERGIC TO HAIR DYE!
So, back to going grey, working on the “silver fox” effect. Will keep wearing hats, sunglasses, and suncreen – fortunately, my hair is long enough to cover the tops of my ears, but I usually sunscreen them too, anyway. Want to keep some semblance of the “fox” part of “silver fox” in play. ; )
LiminalOwl
@UncleEbeneezer: I recommend Zenni Optical (online). Also, by any chance do you need to look up ocular albinism?
Another Scott
@J R in WV: My dad had ocular melanoma – it’s not recommended. :-( It’s rare – he thinks that maybe he got it from doing arc welding.
They didn’t catch it in time for any fancy treatment, so he lost his right eye. Some local guy to him in NC painted the fake iris to try to make it look more natural and did a good job, but it was different enough to notice.
It’s an aggressive cancer, so he didn’t survive it.
Be careful out there!
Cheers,
Scott.