Today is Ride the Wind Day*.

*celebrating the anniversary of the first man-powered flight

wash and wear
Charles's doctor recommends that he shampoo his eyelashes to prevent a recurrence of his chronic problem with styes in his eyes. Charles evidently finds this perplexing, but I'm not entirely surprised.

See, I'm betting that Charles washes his face in the same way that Dean (and every other guy I know who is not my actor brother) does. That is to say, he stands in the shower, rubs his hand once or twice over the bar of soap, scrubs the resulting lather haphazardly and somewhat viciously across his face, and rinses quickly.

This is in extreme contrast to the way most women wash their faces. First we stand in the shower or over the sink, and splash our faces until they're good and dripping wet, to prevent the cleansing product from sticking too much to the skin. Then we apply a dab of cleansing cream or scrub or gel or whatever to our clean hand or facial brush or sponge or that strange-even-to-me artifact of hygienic arcana, the 'face lily'. (But we never use soap, unless it's super-duper-wonderful specialty soap.) If the cleansing gunk is supposed to be lathered, we spend some time working up a good lather. We next massage said cleansing product gently into the skin, preferably using upward strokes, taking special care of the delicate eye area and the crevices on the sides of the nose (where dirt gets trapped, potentially forming--shudder!--black- or whiteheads, which no one else will ever see, but will bug us tremendously, because we'll know, won't we?). Then we splash our faces again, about 20 times to get all the product off; or we stand under the shower spray long enough to belt out one or two songs, which we would except that we're too busy remembering to breathe through our mouths.

The really annoying thing is, on the whole, guys don't actually have significantly worse skin than we do. Yet if we were to cease our ritual ablutions for, say, a day, we'd break out in zits and blotches before you could say "Neutrogena". Not to mention styes in the eyes.

Trivia Quiz
What are the seven wonders of the ancient world, and how many survive to this day?

answer to Saturday's question
Hoodie Hoo Day is a holiday on which people are encouraged to go outdoors at noon in order to wave their hands over the heads and shout "Hoodie hoo!" at the sky. Celebrated on February 20 in the Northern hemisphere and August 21 or 22 in the Southern hemisphere, it is intended to 'chase away winter and bring in spring'.

In ancient times, people sought to ensure the arrival of spring each year by electing a Winter or Summer King. This man was married to the overall matriarch figure of the town or village, and enjoyed all the rights and privileges of rulership for one year, at the end of which he was ritually sacrificed in a ceremony meant to bring an end to winter and bring about 'the renewal of the earth', a.k.a spring. Hoodie Hoo Day is nothing more than a sanitized version of this rite (because presumably it was getting a leetle challenging to find willing candidates for the role of Winter King).

hoodie hoo-dinis: Ariel (with special props to Rei for making me laugh with "Begone, Foul Enemy of Mine Village!")