new thread
Next Tuesday's mayoral election is between two men whose hair has attracted a lot of attention. The campaign has grown heated as polls show the two contenders neck and neck.
Gavin Newsom has always had hair so short he doesn't need to gel it, but it looks like he does anyway. Little was said about his hair until it became clear that he would be running against....
Matt Gonzalez, who was a longhair at a length just emergent from the awkward stage until a few months ago. As the campaign has progressed, Matt's hair has with each passing month grown curiously a bit shorter, and he's perhaps the only man I've ever seen slip into the awkward stage from the long direction. Now as the election approaches he is at the height of the raging awkward stage hair that we all so intimately know and despise.
The media are having a field day with it. Had Matt just kept his long hair, they would have mostly accepted he was a longhair and let the subject drop. However, surely in an effort to look more "clean cut" without "selling out" (because they would have also had a field day with that), Matt is now at that stage where all the shorthaired people notice him as a person with messy hair.
Although one's sentiment as a longhair can be to support another, the whole metamorphosis of Gonzalez has caused to surface in my mind the undertones of certain characters in Animal Farm, while strains of the Who from decades past taunt my mind... Meet the new boss... Same as the old boss... Indeed, when a man changes the length of his hair, we all know something is likely also going on under his mane.
The two men are very different in politics and philosophy, and the striking difference in their hair is being played by the media to the max. The link produces a search on local newspaper articles that mention the two candidates' surnames and "hair".
As someone posting from the east coast can you clarify something? Wasn't the election in November and didn't Gavin Newsom win? On google I found some news reports to that effect.
I found something about an election December 9th but I also found
stuff about an election in early November that Newsom apparently won.
So does that mean that he won?
While Gavin won the majority of votes in the November election, it was not a clear majority (greater than 50%). As such, there has to be a run-off on December 9th between him and the 2nd place vote-getter, Matt Gonzalez.
...Thanks for sharing this, Bill. Would you be able to post the results when the votes are in?
Gavin Newsom, the shorthaired forever guy, got 58% and Matt Gonzalez, the shorthaired this week guy, got 42%. Those are preliminary figures anyway.
I was sort of relieved. I know when a man goes from being a longhair to being a shorthair (or vice versa) that there's a bit of turmoil going on under his mane, and that during such a transition he's likely to not be sure of exactly who he is. I wasn't sure I wanted such a man making decisions that affected other people. Especially hundreds of thousands of people. I wondered, "Just how else has he been selling out?"
My concerns were affirmed this morning. There was a flyer of Matt's on my doorstep that made one set of promises in English, and underneath it was a Spanish translation. Except it wasn't a translation. In Spanish he said he wanted to give non-citizens the right to vote. Guess a guy like me wasn't supposed to read that part. :-) I voted for Gavin.