Chicks dig it

At a cell biology conference about four years ago, The Doktah and I saw a guy with a rattail around eighteen inches long. In case you don’t recall that particular fashion trend, a rattail is a hairstyle wherein a guy wears a very thin section of hair longer than all of the rest of his hair, like a mini ponytail, but far, far uglier. I didn’t like them in the eighties, and I don’t like them now. A rattail is about as attractive as its name suggests.

We spotted the guy in the audience of a huge presentation, and we whiled away the time wondering what was going through his head. The Doktah thought that he simply felt that the rattail made him look hot. “Chicks dig it,” he was saying to himself.

But I think he is just awaiting the return of the rattail. Everyone knows that fashion is cyclical. He was probably one of the last kids to get on rattail bandwagon when they were in style; maybe his mom wouldn’t let him grow one. So he spent his college, grad school, and postdoc years cultivating it, coaxing it to grow ever longer, all the while thinking, “When these come back in style, baby, the chicks will be all over me!”