SMART!

Rather than just perching atop the naked dome like a scrap of scruffy carpet and making you look like a schmuck, wouldn't it be better for a phony hairpiece to actually DO something?  Like monitor your vital signs, remotely control electronic devices, or navigate via GPS?  OF COURSE IT WOULD.  That's why the Smart Wig exists.  That doesn't mean we don't still love the Stupid Wigs of the world.
 

'Smart' wig navigates by GPS, monitors brainwaves

TOKYO —

Are you both bald AND lost? Then the new “SmartWig” from Japan might be just what you need.

Wearers of the Presentation Wig will be able to remotely control a laser pointer from their mop-top. They can move forward through a PowerPoint slideshow by tugging the right sideburn and go back a page by pulling on the left.

The Navigation Wig uses GPS to speak to satellites and guide users to their destination with tiny vibrations on different parts of the head.

Meanwhile, the Sensing Wig monitors body temperature, blood pressure and brainwaves and can also record sounds and images to allow wearers to playback their day and see what set their systems aflutter.

And so forth.

 

JOSE MANUEL BARROSO

Jose Manuel Barroso, former prime minister of Portugal, is current President of the European Commission.  I have tried to figure out what that means, but it is too complicated for me to understand.  What I do understand is that Sr. Barroso is a world leader in another realm, the realm of the Nice Toupee.  I salute President Barroso for his contribution to this neglected artform!

I only had THIS much hair....

... but I wanted to have THIS much!

NICE TOUPEE, JOSE!

John Travolta Update

Christmas of 2012 gave toupee lovers an extra special gift.  John Travolta has been a rug aficionado's dream for years now, but he leaped to a new dimension of cranial astroturfing with his Olivia Newton John reunion video.

Burt Reynolds

Somewhere along Burt Reynolds' road to becoming the Male Dolly Parton, there had to be a breaking point, a point at which the line had been crossed, when he reached the Level Beyond Human.  That point was somewhere between The Cannonball Run (1981) and Cannonball Run 2 (1984).  This is my documentary evidence:

Here he is in The Cannonball Run - nice toupee, right?  Looks pretty good, fairly believable.

Here he is in Cannonball Run 2.

End of post.

Lee Van Cleef

Last night I was watching a Spaghetti Kung Fu Western Comedy called Blood Money, a.k.a. The Stranger and the Gunfighter, etc., starring Lee Van Cleef.  Why, you may ask.  Because I have a kind of grudging fan relationship with Antonio Margheriti, a.k.a. Anthony M. Dawson because he directed my favorite SF movie of all time, Wild Wild Planet, that is why, and he directed this movie about a gunfighter and a kung fu fighter trying to find a vast fortune of some kind that the clues to its location are tattooed on four different women's butts.  So there is a certain amount of going around getting women to show this Chinese guy their naked heinies, which is kind of amusing for a western to have in it.  Anyway there is one scene where the two protagonists meet in jail and I see Lee Van Cleef looking like this:

 And I am like what the hell, man.  Strangely, throughout most of the movie he looks pretty much like this:

Fairly believable, right?  But in that one scene, in fact just that one camera angle it looks like they ran out of toupees and made him wear a small black bowl on his head.  From the other angle it doesn't look like that.  Just that one camera setup, shot through the bars, they couldn't find his toup and somebody had a black sock they weren't using so they just laid it on top of his dome and said let's just shoot this and nobody will notice.  Well I noticed.  That is my job.  Nice toupee, Lee.

Bob Costas

With the return of the Olympics to the airwaves, so returns also the glorious toupee of  America's official Olympic television presenter Bob Costas.   Perched atop his handsome pate it reminds us all of the flowering days of youth.

 

While almost all of the rest of him travels slowly onward through time, Bob's toup remains a lively thirty-something, letting only a few locks of his natural grey peep out. So we see that while age may rest its gentle hand upon the man beneath it, the toupee is immortal, eternally young.

Dolphy

I confess I never heard of the Philippines' King of Comedy, Dolphy, until just this morning.  He may be remembered there for his long career, or for his introduction of  baggy "Puruntong" shorts to world fashion, but I hope someone other than me recalls him fondly in years to come for his Nice Toupee.

"But my toup is still going strong!"

"I said, IT'S NOT REAL!!"