Bonus Tuesday Post: Non-Knitting Content Ahead

You've Come a Long Way, Baby
My fellow '70s sisters will remember that slogan from a certain ad campaign back in the day. Although the product being advertised was harmful (cigarettes), the sentiment was right on. So am I wrong to be disturbed by this:

Look, Girls! It's Ho Barbie!


And her Little Ho Posse!


This was from a McDonalds Happy Meal, folks. Maybe I'm being reactionary, but these little dolls look less than wholesome, and certainly unworthy of being role models for young girls. Give me Groovy Girls anyday.

And While We're At It ...
As I've mentioned before, I try to view each stage of growing older with an air of bemused detachment, but sometimes my body does something so strange, so weird, I have to stop and contemplate the experience a little more fully. Latest musings: Hair. Unwanted hair. Hair in weird, unexpected places. OK, so basically the human body is composed of cells, all responding to on/off signals, kinda like a computer. 99.99% of the time, things work great. Skin sheds cells and regrows new layers, nails grow, hair grows in the usual places.

I was putting in an earring in my right ear the other day, and my finger became tangled in a 2" long hair growing immediately above the piercing. WTF? This sucker was baby-fine, blond, and growing straight out of my earlobe! Flying free and long enough to take a curling iron to it. And this wasn't the first one of these rogue hairs. Last year, I had one growing out of my left cheek, about 1" from my ear. How could my hairdresser not notice either of these hairs? How could I not have noticed them for (at least) the 4 months it took to grow them? And why the h*ll did they grow in the first place? What cellular signal went haywire and said, "Grow, little hair! Grow beyond your normal 1/8" length, and reach for the stars!"

The only reason (OK, 2 reasons) this bothers me is: 1) what happens when I get to be an old lady and don't notice these weird *ss hairs before they reach my knees; and 2) if hair cells can go haywire, so can other cells. After all, that's how cancer starts -- from a bad cellular signal. A cell zigging to the left instead of the right. Believe me, I don't spend hours obsessing on this stuff, but you gotta wonder about the capriciousness of the human body. Geez.