"My wife is going to hate it because nothing makes you look older than when an older guy dyes his hair."

Said George Clooney, quoted in the London Times, with a photo that shows how right he is:

I clicked on that headline because I thought it was going to be about brown clothing. Did you know the color brown is a fashion trend? See, from last October, "Chocolate Brown Is Fall’s Breakout Color Trend" (Harper's Bazaar).

But it's about brown hair. I notice George only speaks for older guys. 

AND: So you go to some play because a famous actor — famously handsome actor — is in it, but then there's just some guy on stage and he doesn't even look like him. But it's not supposed to look like him. It's supposed to look like Edward R. Murrow!

"No, with a beautiful head of white hair. Go ahead. I’ll tell you if I like his hair in about a minute, after he asks the question."

Said Donald Trump — calling on the last questioner at yesterday's press briefing — addressing a man identified as "Speaker 11" in the transcript.

The man with the white hair that was beautiful or not beautiful depending on how much Trump liked his question want to know about Trump's "LIBERATE VIRGINIA" tweet that connected the protest of the lockdown to the Second Amendment. ("LIBERATE VIRGINIA, and save your great 2nd Amendment. It is under siege!")

Doesn't that "potentially pose a concern" about "civil unrest"?

Notice that the man did not say Doesn't that foment armed rebellion? — and that makes the head of white hair look beautiful. Indeed, Trump called the question "an easy one" — so we may infer that Trump "like[d] his hair."

Trump's answer to the question:

We’re entitled to a Second Amendment and [the Governor of Virginia is] trying to take... that Second Amendment right away. To me that’s liberty. When I say "Liberate Virginia," I would say "Liberate Virginia" when that kind of thing happens and where does it all stop? So I think it’s a very good analogy.... [Y]ou have them working and signing documents trying to take your Second Amendment away essentially. So I do think it’s an appropriate time to bring it up.

What's the analogy? I think it's in using the idea of a state "under siege" and in need of "liberation" to describe a state that is limiting Second Amendment rights. The right to keep and bear arms is a "liberty" — he's saying — so if the state is cutting back on that liberty and you want to fight against that, you can say — in colorful language — that it's a fight to "liberate" the state.

ADDED: This morning, I heard a snippet of MSNBC on the car radio. A Michigan Congressman, Dan Kildee, was asked about the protests against the stringent restrictions. What would he would say to the people who feel that they are deprived of liberty?

I don't have the verbatim quote, but Kildee had an earnest way of presenting safety as liberty. He was not talking about gun rights, specifically, but he was using the same rhetoric that I've heard in the defense of gun control regulations. Restrictions on liberty are justified by characterizing one person's liberty as an impingement on the liberty of others. Just as gun control is presented as a protection of the people's right to be free of gun violence, Kildee presented the stay-at-home orders as a protection of the people's right to be free from the virus.

The rhetoric of liberty is available to everyone and is presumed to be what Americans want to hear. Wanting to be safe is repackaged as a love of the freedom to be found in safety.

"I’ve been thinking about aging a lot lately because of Keanu Reeves and his rumored girlfriend, who is 46 and has gray hair."

"She’s gorgeous, of course, but the fact that she doesn’t dye her hair has caused an absolute cataclysm online. Everyone’s been congratulating Keanu on his age-appropriate date, — only nine years younger than him! So different from Leonardo DiCaprio! Some people have also confused her for Helen Mirren, which is somewhat reasonable because they do look alike, but also horrifying because Helen Mirren is 74. This supports my long-standing theory, developed the minute I turned 35, that people under the age of 35 think of all people over the age of 35 as 'old.' Once someone has crossed that barrier, it doesn’t matter if she’s 46 or 74 — the point is that she is not young.... I wish this were not the case, but I’m a little freaked out about turning 39. I liked being 35, right in the middle. Because let’s be honest — what we’re talking about, when we’re talking about women and aging, is losing status. Just by staying alive over the next decades, just by not dying, my value is going to drop. What a raw deal! It’s going to happen to me, and if you’re a woman, it’s going to happen to you, and it already happened to Alexandra Grant, which is why we’re all so proud of Keanu, a man with so much status, for allegedly dating her anyway."

From "Keanu Reeves’s Lady Friend Has Given Me the Courage to Turn 40" by Izzy Ginspan — which is a fantastic name for a humorist — in New York Magazine.

In a far less comic mode but on the same subject enough to keep me from making a separate post, here's Francine Prose, the 72-year-old novelist, in "Cruel jokes about the old are everywhere. When will we face our ageism epidemic?/We tolerate mockery of the elderly that we’d never allow if it targeted another group. But we’ll all be old one day" (at The Guardian):

It’s unsurprising that animosity toward the elderly has been profitably commodified... [T]he phrase “OK Boomer” is “Generations Z’s ... retort to the problem of older people who just don’t get it.” OK Boomer now appears on phone cases, stickers, pins, and sweatshirts and on a range of products that say, “OK boomer, have a terrible day.” “‘If they do take it personally’,” according to one 17-year-old quoted in the piece, “‘it just further proves that they take everything we do as offensive.’” And yet one wonders if the public would be quite so amused by a logo that said: “OK Jews, have a terrible day.” Given the losses and infirmities that so often accompany age, don’t the elderly have enough bad days without being told to have more?

The accepted explanation and justification for all this is that the old have ruined things for the young... [but] I think that the animosity toward the old is less economic than existential, less political than primal, less about student debt than about fear of one’s own ageing.... What’s striking is that the prejudice against the elderly is the only bigotry directed at the inevitable future of the bigot. Few misogynists, I imagine, fear that they eventually will turn into women, nor do racists worry that the passing decades will radically alter their ethnicity and the color of their skin. But the young will get old, if they’re lucky....

Maybe we can talk the young out of their mockery and aversion by telling them they're attacking their own future selves and magnifying their own fear of aging. I would add that we Boomers in our youth were very cruel to those who were older. We had the slogan "Never trust anyone over 30." Confront the young of today with the idea that they're acting like we did in our time. If you don't like what we are, you'd better work on being something else. And that goes right along with the cancel-culture fastidiousness about any mockery or aversion to any traditionally discriminated against group. Be that, kids, and manifest nothing but the celebration of diversity that includes the old people. OK, Zoomer?

"I like Cali sober because for me it means that even though I’m getting older, and I take monthlong breaks from drinking occasionally, it doesn’t mean that my life can’t still be enjoyable."

"It’s sort of equivalent to being a silver fox: your hair might be gray, and you might be taking it a little slower, but you can still be hot!"

Says Naomi Fry, a staff writer at The New Yorker, quoted in "What Does It Mean to Be ‘Cali Sober’?" (NY Magazine). NY Magazine defines "Cali sober" as abstaining from alcohol but smoking marijuana.

Every Urban Dictionary definition for "silver fox" says it's a sexy older man.

Wikipedia has a list of famous people who have been nicknamed "silver fox" — and all are men (George Clooney,  Anderson Cooper, Charlie Rich, Duke Snider, Eduard Shevardnadze...).

The Merriam-Webster website defines the "silver fox" as "generally meaning 'an attractive middle-aged man having mostly gray or white hair'" and gives a history of the term going back to a 1920s baseball player, Jess Petty, who had gray hair. But...

Silver fox is sometimes used to refer to women with gray or white hair as well (in fact, the bestselling exercise video Richard Simmons and the Silver Foxes from 1987 clearly meant both men and women, since they perform the workout together behind the fitness guru), but many uses make clear reference to the fact that the term usually designates men...

I don't think Naomi Fry is very old herself. I was reading her Twitter feed...

it's like he's clamping down on a piece of bark https://t.co/56iHvAcHPk

— Naomi Fry (@frynaomifry) October 28, 2019

... but it strikes me as really unattractive for an older women to proclaim that she's sexually attractive. And I feel completely alienated from the idea that you're "hot" and preserving your last chance to have an "enjoyable" life because you smoke weed. And I see no equivalence between leaving your head in its naturally gray condition and infusing your natural head with an intoxicating substance.

"Every few years I try to let my white hair grow in, then give up after about an inch. I keep saying I’ll do it when there’s more..."

"... when it might look like a choice rather than inevitability. But the collateral benefit to the new trend among the young is that older women are now freer to discover what might be a natural asset hiding under a veil of dye. Some women discover they look better with white hair — who would have thought?"

From a NYT article with the subtitle "Fashion’s fixation with frosty manes has made white locks desirable — even for those old enough to own them."

"And Mr. Chandor can verify to skeptics Mr. Redford’s claim that his hair remains naturally Hubbell strawberry blond."

"His locks survived the months of sun and chlorine, with no colorist in sight," writes Maureen Dowd in that NYT article that we're already talking about in that first post of the day.

“No one believes me,” Mr. Redford said. “Even my kids didn’t believe me. I keep thinking of Reagan. It’s freaking me out.”

Chandor is J. C. Chandor, the director of Redford's new movie, "All Is Lost," which is a seafaring tale, hence the "sun and chlorine."

Dowd doesn't say whether she believes him, but she quotes "No one believes me" without stating her view. She has the mysterious line "Mr. Chandor can verify," but did she ask Mr. Chandor, and who can believe that Mr. Chandor watched Mr. Redford at all times? Who thinks Ronald Reagan didn't dye his hair? But it's nice of Robert Redford to keep thinking about Ronald Reagan. These slow-aging Hollywood RRs need to stick together with their age-defying secrets.

What does Hubbell refer to in "naturally Hubbell strawberry blond"? The Hubbell telescope? "There are no 'natural color' cameras aboard the Hubble and never have been. The optical cameras on board have all been digital CCD cameras, which take images as grayscale pixels." It's Hubble, not Hubbell, so it can't be that — though I'm interested in the fakeness of all those colorful photographs of the universe that we've been looking at all these years.

Here's the atheist Christopher Hitchens burbling about "the color and depth and majesty" of the Hubble photographs as he urges us to see the revelations of science as more awe-inspiring than the old stories told by religions:

The argument for letting your hair grow long and white as you age and not getting any facial surgery or Botox.

From 83-year-old "supermodel" Daphne Selfe. (Great name, by the way.)

Selfe, who went gray in her 40s, gave up coloring her hair and decided to let it grow.

“My hair is long now because it’s cheaper. I don’t have to do anything but put it in a topknot or a French pleat,” she said. “It avoids that old lady permed look, lengthens the neck and lifts the face.”

"Ann — Every day, I see Barack make choices he knows will affect every American family."

"That's no small task for anyone — and more proof that he's earning every last one of those gray hairs. This has been a busy week in Washington, but today happens to be Barack's 50th birthday...."

Michelle emails me. The subject line is "Gray hairs." Don't you see? That gray hair? He's gone gray for us.

Anybody who runs for President is committing to working extremely hard and getting old at a faster rate than they would if they'd refrained from volunteering to work on all our problems all the time for 4 years. We the people are more concerned with whether we like your work product. You can't really get any pity for pointing to your graying hair. We're a pitiless bunch, because you stepped up to the big job and there's too much at stake.

But happy birthday, anyway, Mr. President.

"Before We are Democrats or Republicans, We are Americans," said Obama in his weekly address this morning.

And what's the first thing you notice — the difference between today and the speech he gave at the memorial? Right. Different color hair. Gray for the memorial, signifying the wise elder, the father figure. Back to dark hair to signify the vigorous young man, ready to forge ahead, solving problems, and restoring his party's electoral fortunes.

Restoring his party's electoral fortunes?!! Are you aghast that I would say such a thing when the literal message is "Before We are Democrats or Republicans, We are Americans"? But it's clear to me that the GOP is on the political upswing, and it's in the Democratic Party's interest to proclaim a period of low-key nonpartisanship and take away its opponents' momentum.

"I just said I've always wanted to sleep with a man with gray hair."

Apparently, Howard Fineman's hair is setting the tone.

"Gray is nature's way of whispering 'You're dying.'"

Anderson Cooper talks about his gray hair. He says it can be cool for a guy to go prematurely gray. But:

When was the last time you saw a sexy gray-haired woman in a movie? Rogue and Storm don't count; they're cartoon characters.

"It's not fair," says Diane Harris, a media image consultant, "but men see gray on a woman and they think she's old."

My friend Cathy went gray in her early thirties. She was attractive and successful, but guys backed away.

"Men instantly assumed Birkenstock-wearing, protest-rally-organizing cat lover," Cathy says. "You could see it in their eyes."

Needless to say, Cathy's no longer gray.

Gray and white are flattering colors. We wear clothes in these colors all the time. But the meaning of gray/white hair is just too deep. I started getting white hairs when I was a teenager and had so many by time I was in my late twenties that my naturally red hair didn't read as red anymore. It just looked dull. And when I ran into friends I hadn't seen in a while the horror would show on their faces! You have to color. Anyway, most women color their hair even when they aren't going gray, don't they? Gray hair? It's just not done anymore. Completely white hair? That might be cool, but it takes a while before it's completely white, and by the time it is, you've probably been coloring so long that it's hard to think of how you could do it. Let the roots grow over the summer, then cut it so only the new uncolored part is left. Then waltz into work in September with very short, absolutely white hair. That would really shock people. I'd do it. But only if they made a reality TV show about me doing it.