Rolling Stones – "Short and Curlies" (1974)

It’s too bad

She’s got you by the b*lls

Do any of you happen to have a phone number or e-mail address for Stephen King?

If so, could you send it to me?  I have an idea for a book or movie that I think he would love!

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Years ago, I knew a couple who owned a male black Lab that had never been neutered.  I think his name was Randy, or maybe Rowdy.  (Either one would have been appropriate.)

That dog was always running away in search of female companionship.  When his quest for a little doggie lovin’ was unsuccessful, he would hump any neighborhood children who were friendly to him.

One day, he got overly excited playing with a teenage girl and started thrusting at her until he made a mess all over her blue jeans.

After that, the horrified wife insisted to her husband that they take the dog to the vet and get him castrated.  But the husband would have no part of it.

“If I let you get the dog fixed,” he told his wife, “next thing you’ll want to do is get me fixed.”

(True dat!)

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I was reminded of that couple and their dog at trivia a few nights ago.  I was hanging around having a beer after leading my team to a hard-fought victory, when one of the women sitting at the bar mentioned that she having minor outpatient surgery in a few days.

“If you’re not having general anesthesia, you should ask the doctor if you could watch while he does the surgery,” one of her friends suggested.

“I watched when my husband had his vasectomy,” another woman announced.  

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” I thought to myself.  “What kind of harpy would enjoy watching while her husband underwent a vasectomy?”

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Actually, I think a lot of women would enjoy watching while their husbands got “fixed.”

In fact, I think more than a few of them would be happy to personally perform the procedure if they had the chance. 

I don’t think any man alive would want a scalpel-wielding wife anywhere near his private parts.  “Have you had any affairs since we got married?” I can just hear her asking while in the middle of doing the ol’ snip-snip.  “Don’t lie to me!”

If that’s not a more terrifying scenario that those that King dreamed up in The Shining or Carrie or Cujo or even Misery, I don’t know what is.

Actually, forget about sending me King’s phone number or e-mail address.  I bet I can write the book or screenplay myself and sell it for at least a million bucks.  

Why share any of that cash with King?  He’s got plenty of do-re-mi already.

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It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll – which the Stones released in 1974 – isn’t in the same class as their very best albums (e.g., Let It Bleed and Sticky Fingers), but it’s not bad.  In fact, it may be the best of their post-Exile on Main St. albums.

“Short and Curlies” – it’s the obvious choice for today’s featured song – has never been performed in concert by the Stones.    

Click here to listen to “Short and Curlies.”

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon:

Rolling Stones – "Short and Curlies" (1974)

It's too bad

She's grabbed a handful 

And you can't get away from it all 

Wally Moon was a very good major-league baseball player.  He was the National League Rookie of the Year in 1954 – easily beating out future Hall of Famers Ernie Banks and Hank Aaron for that honor – and played in three All-Star games.

He also had one of the all-time great monobrows – or unibrows, if you prefer:

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A male can get away with having a monobrow.  It’s much harder for a female to pull that look off, but Mexican artist Frida Kahlo certainly did.

Kahlo wasn’t shy about emphasizing her monobrow in her self-portraits:

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I’m not a dermatologist or a doctor of any kind.  In fact, I know next to nothing about medical science or science in general.  

But I do enjoy kicking back with a cold one and having a gander at the “Notable Notes” section of the American Medical Association’s JAMA Dermatology journal.

The previous 2 or 3 lines discusses a “Notable Notes” article titled “Skin Suffocation,” which explains that covering someone’s entire body with paint won’t cause them to suffocate – contrary to what James Bond said in the movie Goldfinger.  

The author of that article, Helena Jenkinson of the University of Texas Medical School, is also the author of a “Notable Notes” piece titled “Consider the Monobrow” which appeared in the July 2017 issue of JAMA Dermatology.  (Is it just me, or does “Notable Notes” sound more like something you would find in Reader’s Digest than in a medical journal?)

A 19th-century Persian painting

Ms. Jenkinson notes in that article that while the monobrow – the scientific term is synophrys – is generally regarded to be an undesirable physical trait by Americans, other cultures have viewed it as a good thing:

[T]he abrou-ye peyvasteh, or “continuous eyebrow,” was once celebrated in Persian paintings and poetry.  In ancient Greece, the monobrow was associated with beauty and intelligence.  Those lacking the feature naturally imitated it by filling in the space between the eyebrows with either kohl or lampblack, a paint made from soot.  A similar beauty practice involving an herbal paint occurs to this day in Tajikistan, where synophrys remains fashionable. 

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If you want to get rid of your monobrow, you can wax the area between your eyebrows.  

Waxing is also a popular method of grooming pubic hair, but a February 2014 “Notable Notes” article titled “Wax On, Wax Off: Pubic Hair Grooming and Potential Complications” warns that waxing the bikini area may “cause deficits in the mucocutaneous barrier that may be sufficient for viral entry and transmission, potentially increasing the risk of acquiring sexually transmitted infections.”

The authors of that article suggest that doctors advise individuals who wax their pubic areas to abstain from sexual activity for a certain period of time after waxing.  But since pubic hair grooming is usually done in anticipation of having sex in the near future, such advice may not be heeded.

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The editors of JAMA Dermatology seem to be very interested in pubic hair grooming.

The August 2017 of that journal includes an article entitled “Prevalence of Pubic Hair Grooming-Related Injuries and Identification of High-Risk Individuals in the United States,” which presents the results of a study of over five thousand Americans who engage in pubic hair grooming.  

Believe it or not, about 25% of those people reported that they had sustained a grooming-related injury.  Of that group, almost a third had hurt themselves five or more times!

Several of the co-authors of that article are doctors at the University of California at San Francisco’s hospital.  About 3% of the adults who visit the UCSF hospital’s emergency room do so because of pubic area grooming injuries.

Granted, we are talking about San Francisco here.  But that’s still a lot of injuries.

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“Short and Curlies” was released on the 1974 album, It’s Only Rock ’n’ Roll.

That album – the 14th studio album released in the U.S. by the Stones – was the last one that featured Mick Taylor.  Taylor had replaced Brian Jones in the band in 1969, when Taylor was only 20 years old.

Mick Taylor

Shortly after Taylor quit the band, rock critic Robert Palmer of the New York Times wrote that “Taylor is the most accomplished technician who ever served as a Stone.  A blues guitarist with a jazzman's flair for melodic invention, Taylor was never a rock and roller and never a showman.”

Here’s “Short and Curlies”:

Click below to buy the song from Amazon: