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An Ode is Owed

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No doubt the former Governor of the State of Illinois, sentenced to 14 years in jail yesterday, will soon be immortalized by the jailhouse poets. Oh, yes, there are many denizens of the gentler arts behind bars! Among them is the great P. Oswald Effinger the Third, a convicted and unrepentant repeat pedant, who has already offered a modest effort. P.O.E. III, as he is called, holds the title of Poet Incarcerate at Paul Powell Penitentiary in Pawnee, IL, which is one of only a handful of fully alliterative detention centers in the U.S.

A note from the poet: “The newly minted inmate will find a warm welcome in jail. I predict people will want to call out his name from their cells because it is such a treat to say, and so it will echo up and down the halls of the penitentiary. I believe his name is a marvel. With four full syllables, it permits full expression and can be spoken in such a way to match any human emotion. On paper, the name looks like a mess. It is a pure deception. The name wants to be rhymed, needs to be rhymed, begs and pleads to be rhymed. What I have given you, then, is a poem that some may call an abomination, but I assure you, all the couplets are completely consensual.

    Now it is Christmas, so be of good cheer!
    All the townsfolk will gather their families near.
    With their hearts full of kindness and mercy and joy, of which
    not very much will be shared with Blagojevich.

    He had been rather great for a very short while
    Like his hair he impressed us with volume and style.
    He was boastful and brusque. You could not call him coy. And which
    laws he’d obey was known just to Blagojevich.

    He was caught on tape saying “I’ve got it … this thing.”
    “And it’s golden,” he said, clearly thinking, ka-ching!
    Illinois is a state that grows corn stalks and soy. A switch
    isn’t too likely. Just ask Rod Blagojevich.

    In the prison they’ll cut off his iconic locks.
    there’s enough there to weave into ten pairs of socks.
    Though to wear them is something you wouldn’t enjoy. An itch
    needs to be scratched if that itch is Blagojevich!

How important is it to have an impressive head of hair?

61 thoughts on “An Ode is Owed”

  1. She asks me why
    I’m just a hairy guy
    I’m hairy noon and night
    Hell that’s a fright
    I’m hairy high and low
    Don’t ask me why
    Don’t know
    It’s not for lack of bread
    Like the Grateful Dead
    Darling

    Gimme head with hair
    Long beautiful hair
    Shining, gleaming,
    Streaming, flaxen, waxen

    Give me down to there hair
    Shoulder length or longer
    Here baby, there mama
    Everywhere daddy daddy

    Hair, hair, hair, hair, hair, hair, hair
    Flow it, show it
    Long as God can grow it
    My hair

    Let it fly in the breeze
    And get caught in the trees
    Give a home to the fleas in my hair
    A home for fleas
    A hive for bees
    A nest for birds
    There ain’t no words
    For the beauty, the splendor, the wonder
    Of my…

    Hair, hair, hair, hair, hair, hair, hair
    Flow it, show it
    Long as God can grow it
    My hair

    I want it long, straight, curly, fuzzy
    Snaggy, shaggy, ratty, matty
    Oily, greasy, fleecy
    Shining, gleaming, streaming
    Flaxen, waxen
    Knotted, polka-dotted
    Twisted, beaded, braided
    Powdered, flowered, and confettied
    Bangled, tangled, spangled, and spaghettied!

    Oh say can you see
    My eyes if you can
    Then my hair’s too short

    Down to here
    Down to there
    I want hair
    Down to where
    It stops by itself

    They’ll be ga ga at the go go
    When they see me in my toga
    My toga made of blond
    Brilliantined
    Biblical hair

    My hair like Jesus wore it
    Hallelujah I adore it
    Hallelujah Mary loved her son
    Why don’t my mother love me?

    Hair, hair, hair, hair, hair, hair, hair
    Flow it, show it
    Long as God can grow it
    My hair, hair, hair, hair, hair, hair, hair
    Flow it, show it
    Long as God can grow it
    My hair, hair, hair, hair, hair, hair, hair
    Flow it, show it
    Long as God can grow it
    My hair

    Hair, hair, hair, hair, hair, hair, hair

    [

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  2. Good morning to all. I like having hair. Is it important to have hair? I guess not. I assume you get by very well as person without much hair, Dale. Of course, there are a lot of jokes and some songs about people with little or no hair. Well, the people of little hair have created the opportunity for the those jokes and songs so they have made a contribution by offering this opportunity. Any one who has a reduced amount of hair should, I think, feel honored that jokes and songs are made or composed about their lack of hair.

    I am reminded of the name for a band lead by Dean McGraw, Eight Head. All the members of that band are partly bald. Dean said the band members don’t have fore heads, they have eight heads.

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      5. You might be thinking of Robin Adnan Anders, tim. Mark Anderson has preformed as the drummer for Boiled in Lead, but the drummer who is best know for his work with Boiled in Lead is Anders.

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      6. thanks jim i looked them both up and too tell the truth i cant remember too much about them form my exposure other than i really liked the guy. i think it was marc but anders looks outstanding too. another name to add to my far from photographic memorybank

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  3. In Minnesota in the wintertime, a full head of hair has considerable insulation value. Given the choice, I would go with having hair. You don’t always have much of a choice though.

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    1. When my son was young one of his life goals was to be bald. We often amused ourselves in boring situations by counting the chrome domes.

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    2. ive done it both ways and i can tell you they are both possible. hair is much easier than no hair if maintanence is assumed. used to take 15 or 20 minutes to shave my head every morning and get the nubs gone thne the 5 oclock shadow would absolutley be back at 5. i could not get by the daily deal and only deal with it periodicly which surprised me, i am not anal about much but smooth chrome dome or not were the two options not kinda sorta one or the other.

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  4. Dale, again – we are not worthy!

    when i was a teenager, my paternal Grandma used to ask me to “come over and cut my three hairs.” she really had thin hair and my Dad was balding before i met him 🙂 now, 50 years later, my “hairs” are departing in alarming numbers. my friend and i were just talking about this yesterday – she, complaining that she was going bald too. a beautiful head of hair is a wonderful thing – but it’s not everything. unimpressive hair lets one fly under the radar in a crowd. always good. and my Dad was a great Dad anyway – hair or no.

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  5. blagojavich blagojevich that magical name
    without hair in jail will he still be the same?
    he cant wow us with panache the way that he did
    his bravissimo glowing neath that fluffy brown lid

    he peek out at us slyly from under those bangs
    now his bunkmate will see eyebrows are they big bushy things?
    or little thin pencil brows , i m not sure i know
    but i guess we will soon cause that mops sure to go

    he’ll look like a chiwawa his head all clean shaven
    in the coumpound at recess he best be behavin
    the inmates will size him up and then they will plot
    and to make him their leader i bet they will not

    this man will be here fourteen years they have said
    and all have an unincumbered view of his head
    if hes touting his influence in here to the fellas
    it wont be a senate seat he will be sellin

    good luck and good riddence to an ugly example
    of power gone wrong and though prior sleezebags are ample
    blogajevich is perfect to channel our disgust
    showing before and after pictures of his shaved head is a must

    bring your children in close the punchlines are rich
    the the saga of chicago politics and blogojavich
    how people who think they are above the law
    do get caught and imprisoned and we do fix the flaw

    but there will be another all history hath shown
    who will also be found guily and his head will be mown
    but today we can say that we caught the bad guy
    with his hand in the cookie jar and then telling lies

    now we can think of twiddleing out taxed paid for thumbs
    he’ll live up to themodel as king of political bums
    there is no doubt in my mind when i think of blogojavich
    illl be conjutrring and unrepentant jerk face, a dumb son of a bitch

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    3. You’ve outdone yourself, tim, yet again! Love chiwawa, makes a whole lot more sense than chihuahua.

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  7. Is a crime story On or Off topic:
    My son’s fb post this morning from San Jose:
    Our dog totally earned his keep tonight. He woke us up when someone was breaking into a side window!! Thanks to the SJ police who found the guy a few blocks over.

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    1. yep bless dogs and cops. i hate the feeling of walking into a ransacked place after the creeps have had their way with my stuff. its come up a couple of times and it is a sorry statement about our world. how about shaving the robbers heads like austrailian convicts from the old movies
      or better yet let blogojavich room with a new guy who fits this description so he can meet his constituants.

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      2. He had a conversation through the window with the guy trying to break in, 60 something, claiming to be a Viet Name Vet. Then he ended up cruising with the cops after they found the guy sitting on someone’ else’s porch with a stolen stroller. Clearly a man with issues of drugs, booze, or brain dysfunction.
        And if you don’t wan the ipad . . . (just kidding).

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  8. My dad was bald by the time he was twenty-two, and I must have inherited my hair gene from him. Fine, wavy hair with no body, that’s what I’m stuck with. I take some comfort in his assertion that it’s not what’s on the outside of the head that’s important, it’s what’s on the inside that counts. But, my sister is blessed with beautiful, thick, red hair and no matter what’s on the inside of my head, I feel shortchanged!

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    1. be thankful you could have a beautiful head of hair and have no idea there was anything to feel shortchanged about. i have the mental images of bambi the bimbo and her blank stare off into la la land as the world is crashing down around her…. nice hair though

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  10. I don’t think his hair saved him. He is his own undoing, hair or no.

    Man, I wish I could use alliteration and rhyme the way you do, Dale! I also wish I could just rhyme on the fly the way you do, tim.

    My hair’s growing back though!

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    1. What an awful post. “I don’t think his hair saved him.” Duh. I meant that I don’t think his hair could have saved him.

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      1. Not awful, Krista. Thought provoking. What if Blago’s hair is a separate and distinct creature from the man himself? An alien, perhaps, and the “guy” below is simply a manifestation or some 3-D projection that represents the hair’s idea of what sort of guy should be wearing it? The man may go to prison, but I’m guessing the hair will escape.

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      3. guy goes into a bar with a from on top of his head, bartender says where did you get that and the frog says . it started as this weird growth on my left butt cheek

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  11. Rise and Shine Baboons!

    I think I have this iPad thing figured out now, thanks to some generous technical advice from Anna who researched this out of curiousity. Anna, I followed your instructions and they worked perfectly. Thanks to our “Techanna” which is her new brand.

    Meanwhile, the hair thing seems pretty important to me. Any topic that inspires an entire musical as quoted by Beth-Ann has alot of value to somebody. (So what does that say about “The Book of Mormon,” now a hit on Broadway)? Michael Jordan’s lack of hair defined him. Blago’s excess hair defined him and his poor stylist, now doomed to the death penalty.

    There is an old family picture around of my mother and her parents and siblings. They had magnificant hair, even at the end of the Great Depression. We still call it the “Hair Picture>” There you see 10 beautiful, wavy striking heads of hair.

    My hair, thin, fine, hard to manage, comes from my father’s side.

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      1. The short answer is that if you are using Safari on your iPad, you are viewing it in “mobile view” (which is generally a stripped down version of a standard browser view – the mobile view is intended for smaller screens like your iPhone). With WordPress sites, it can try to serve some of that using Flash…which doesn’t work and play well with Safari. There is another iPad-friendly browser my husband uses that gets around this when he needs to, otherwise, look for a link (usually at the bottom of the page, usually in small type) that says something like “standard view” or something like along those lines. The “standard view” serves up how the page looks in a standard (non-mobile device) browser.

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  12. Greetings! Hair can make such a difference whether we like it or not. The fact that we spend so much time and money on it is a big clue to its power on our looks and vanity. I was blessed with thick, wavy hair from my dad — who had a very nice head of silver hair up to his death at age 76. My main misfortune is that I grayed early. One of my older sisters also has beautiful, thick hair; but hardly any gray at all – still a beautiful brunette shade that I envy. When you see entire aisles of a store dedicated to shampoo, conditioner, sprays, gels, lotions, dyes, brushes, combs, dryers, stylers, curlers, barrettes, bands, etc. — you know you’ve got an obsession. Plus all those hairstylists, cutters, colorists, extensions, braids, wigs, milliners, hair restoration and other folks who make their living “doing” our hair.

    How about celebrities who are defined by their hair or lack thereof? Farah Fawcett, Michael Jordan, Crystal Gale and now that bozo Blagojevich. How many ways can we say obsession?

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  13. I was blessed with what a roommate called “fat hair”, in that era when we all wore it long and straight. I can’t recall a time when it was an advantage, or got me something or somewhere that I wanted. It is nice to have it longish for the winter, sort of like a permanent scarf.

    I do hope this P. Oswald Effinger will visit us again on the blog!

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  14. I have mostly just come to peace with my hair – I don’t know whether for good or bad. I know folks are envious of the curl, but I spent many many years trying to fight, tame, and organize the curls. I am not one to spend a ton of time on my hair, so straightening with an iron is right out (and it would likely just start curling again a few hours later anyway – the curls take what they want). Keeping the curls from being fuzzy is its own battle…and part of how I was finally convinced to start coloring it (for the extra conditioning in a good salon coloring). Some days I wish it was short and straight so I could get a cut like Judi Dench – I love her no-nonsense ‘do, not much to fuss with there. But the curls have become part of “my brand” I guess (getting back to earlier in the week), so I don’t fight them. I just keep them from getting to dry and let them do what they want. And am thankful on a regular basis that although there is a lot of hair on my head, the hair itself is not thick as well as curly…oy…might shave my head then.

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