A botched history of hairdressing

Humans, it would seem, have always had a propensity to mess around with perfectly good and functional parts of their anatomy regardless of any apparent pointlessness or consequences of doing so.

Tattoos.  Piercings.  Victorian era women constricted their waistlines with corsets until their intestines were forced upwards to reside uncomfortably somewhere in the vicinity of their larynxes.

Today toxic injections of the Botulism organism are used to "fluff up" lips, and surplus buttock fat is sucked out to fill up natural laugh lines on faces.

Bald old men still persist in wearing expensive toupees which, even from fifty yards away, resemble dead gerbils draped across the top of their heads, while young hirsute athletes shave it all off and look like little Kojaks hellbent on a mission to acquire cranial skin cancer.

This brings us to our history tutorial for this week;

The History of Hairdressing
It is probably fortunate that luxuriant long hair only sprouts from the head, providing an unchallenged monopoly for hairdressers.
Had it been biologically otherwise, their dominance in the field might have been challenged by an assortment of other occupations such as African Underarm Hair Plaiters and Brazilian Shearers.

Be that as it may.

Ever since Eve discovered Garnier Hair Conditioner (new and improved, containing added aloe vera) on the shelf at her Garden of Eden supermarket, and Randy the caveman slicked back his locks with newly-slaughtered mammoth grease, women and men and been messing around with their hair to attract the opposite sex.
(Note;  Or same sex. This is a non-discriminatory Academy)
The first professional hairdressers were recorded in the 4th century AD, although there is much statuary evidence to suggest that hair decoration was widely practised by ancient Egyptians and Persians too.

When women of the Roman Empire had inadequate tresses they were enhanced with blonde hair shorn from captured warring tribesmen of Germanic origin.

The pinnacle of hairdressing stupidity was reached in England and Europe in the 18th century during the reign of Louis XVI (1774-92).  (refer illustration above)

French coiffeur-to-the-stars Marquis Marcel de Bonkers overindulged in champagne during a lunch at La Cafe Escargot one day after which which he went back to his salon and invented the "coiffure a la frigate", where hair was piled up resembling a monstrous rat's nest with a model warship anchored to the top with pins and combs.

The design went out of fashion following a legal class action from all the male French lovers who had suffered prow wounds to their noses and foreheads sustained during amorous adventures with women adorned with this type of hairstyle.

I am jealous of people who have hair.
In 1964 I adopted a Beatles style 'mop-top', but 47 years later there are only 17 short strands of gray hair left to remind me of that youthful magnificence. (Sorry, 16....one just dropped out while I was typing this paragraph.)

Does anyone have a recently deceased gerbil they would like to donate to a worthy cause?

The history of ice skating

Please settle back and share my vast expertise in ice skating.

As an Australian living in the tropics this astounding stash of knowledge has been accrued from three main sources;

1. Observations made whilst cleaning out the freezer compartment of my refrigerator.

2. Studying Australia's enviable gold-medal skating performances at Winter Olympics.   A grand total of ONE.
In the men's 1000 metre speed skating event at the 2002 Winter Olympics in South Korea, Steven Bradbury, after trailing for the entire race went on to win gold after every other competitor ended up in a spectacular pile-up on the final corner.

3. Viewing countless hours of figure skating on television. (Primarily involving shapely young women dressed in short diaphanous yellow skirts.)

I also once fell in sympathy-love with Nancy Kerrigan (pictured above) back in 1994 after the charming Tonya Harding arranged for harm to be done to Nancy's gorgeous long, shapely, sensuous, sylphen, sexy........my apologies.....I almost drifted off into old-man's fantasies there.

Right!  Back to business.  You are here for the formal history of ice skating, so here it is;

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Ice skating enables a minority of people in the world to make the most of the appalling decision their ancestors made in migrating from hospitable African climes to the frozen extremities of the planet.

It is generally accepted that ice skating began on the frozen canals of The Netherlands more than 1000 years ago, when animal rib or shin bones were strapped to the feet.

When Dutch people travelled to North America in the 19th century, they brought their schaatsen with them along with clogs, windmills, their Dutch courage, elm disease, auctions and ovens.

The first steel skate blade appeared in 1860 and speed skating was introduced as a winter Olympic sport for men at Chamonix, France, in 1924, and for women at the 1960 Olympiad in Squaw Valley, California after the girls demanded equal ankle-sprain rights.

Canada gave birth to the game of Ice Hockey after a mob of unemployed English soldiers were observed swinging sticks at a little flat rock on the icy surface of Kingston Lake, Ontario, in 1867 before the whole lot of them were hauled off by their superior officer to the nearest Sanitorium for psychological intervention followed by repatriation back to Britain.

Figure skating is an activity originally perfected and made popular by Norwegian world champion Sonja Henie.

God bless Sonja.

God bless figure skating, the most graceful and elegant sport in my world.

God bless Nancy Kerrigan.

I still have the latent hots for Nancy Kerrigan.

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P.S. My use of the words "God bless" should not be used as evidence of the History Academy having religious affiliations.
The Cosmic Perspective of life has so far failed to come up with an equivalent phrase to represent this sentiment.

The Dora Ratjen story

This little tale of intrigue involves three bastions of truth, honesty, fairness and incorruptibility.

1. Hitler and the Third Reich.
2. The International Olympic Committee.
3. Journalism and the film industry.

Agnes Zwanzger was a midwife in the little town of Erichshot in Germany during 1918. Like most midde-aged folk, her short-range eyesight was, in optomological terminology "substantially ratshit". Additionally, she'd spent the previous evening demolishing many steins of lager which had the effect of blurring her vision even more.  So, when the infant Ratjen eventually plopped out into her hands she announced "It's a girl. Halleleujah, now has anyone got some aspirin for my headache, I'm going home to sleep off this hangover."
The parents raised the child as a girl, apparently oblivious to the surplus-to-requirements sexual equipment that must have been dangling around in the breeze between her legs.

After puberty when Dora noticed that more bodily development seemed to be taking place inside her frilly pink knickers instead of where it should be happening filling up her sports bra to maximum capacity, she diverted all of her frustration into achieving athletic excellence.

The 1936 Olympic Games had been awarded to Germany before the charming part-mustachioed Mr Hitler came to power.
Mr Hitler subsequently developed a reputation for occasionally exhibiting unsportsmanlike behaviour.  He didn't like his team being beaten, especially by Jewish teams whom he liked the least of all.

So, when Gerhardt Vanker, the German athletics coach suggested
"Yo Adolph baby, Mein Fuhrer, there's this guy in the athletics training squad pretending to be a chick, how 'bout we enter him in the Olympic women's high jump"  Mr Hitler saw it as one way of preventing "any of those inferior obnoxious little Jewish girls from winning it."
Unfortunately Dora only managed 4th place in the event which displeased and disappointed both Mr Hitler and Dora herself.
She trussed up her troublesome genitalian trio even tighter, trained harder, and won the women's high jump gold medal at the 1938 European Athletics Championship with a world-record sproing of 1.67 metres.

Few people, even fellow competitors, ever suspected that Dora was not female, but no-one could pull the gender wool over the eyes of Manfred Schwass the train conductor on the Vienna to Cologne express on 21 September 1938 in which Dora was traveling.

Manfred had spent a lifetime on the trains ogling and mentally recording every set of long sexy legs, wiggling derrieres and jiggling bosoms that had ever passed by him.
He was what the legal fraternity might term an "expert witness."

When Manfred observed Dora, meticulously attired in a brocade dress and sparkling earrings, making her way towards the women's toilet, he noticed some slight discrepancies from normal feminine behaviour.
The early-morning farting, belching, groin scratching and five o'clock shadow which accompanied this girl convinced Manfred that Dora was perhaps more biologically suited to using the gentlemens toilet facilities.

He reported the matter to the police at Magdeburg, the next train station.

Dora's secrets were finally exposed.

She changed her name to Heinrich, handed back the gold medal, and thereafter lived a life of partial seclusion refusing interviews to speak about her life.  The uncorroborated story about Hitler and the Third Reich being involved in Heinrich's career first appeared in a popular magazine in 1966 and was the basis for the 2009 film "Berlin 36".

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It is most probable that the sporting conspiracy allegations are in fact not true, and that Heinrich was simply the unfortunate victim of inept parenting.
He died in 2008.