When I look out the kitchen win­dow at the moment there are men next door build­ing some kind of house that looks more like a giant out­side toilet.

It’s such a small place to con­struct any kind of  build­ing. Per­haps the men are just build­ing their own per­sonal cubby house. That would be pretty cool. If they are build­ing a cubby house I will be able to wave at them from my kitchen when they’re fin­ished build­ing. And maybe they’ll invite me over for lemon­ade and choco­late in their giant-loo-sized cubby house. Orsome.

I have a friend called Ken. He thought that he could make improve­ments to my book. Thanks a lot, Ken. Here are his ‘improve­ments’ with apolo­gies to the fan­tas­tic cover illus­tra­tor Gre­gory Baldwyn.

So what do you think? Per­son­ally I’m just glad he didn’t think of The Great­est Bog­ger in the World because I would hate to see what changes he would have made to illustrations.

After the com­ments and feed­back left on my pre­vi­ous post about the bits and pieces that make up one’s beard, I now present the revised edi­tion of The Anatomy of the Com­mon Beard.

And here’s the KEY:

PHILTRUMLINGS: The hair of the philtrum.

SIDEBURNLINGS: The hair of the sideburn.

CHEEKFUZZLINGS: The fuzzy hair of the cheek.

GINGERLINGS: The inex­plic­a­ble gin­ger hair on blonde or brunette beard.

BERMUDATRIANGLINGS: The place where hair refuses to grow at all despite the clear geo­graph­i­cal require­ment of hair growth.

UNDERLINGS: Neck hairs.

TRANSCHESTLINGS:  The hairs that sit just under the Adam’s apple and glare envi­ously past the collarbone.

Thanks to Phill, Ken, #2 and House­mate Numero Uno for their input.

Win­ter is cer­tainly a time when beards are at their most sported. Every sec­ond or third man seems to wear a beard at some point of winter.

After a dis­cus­sion on Twit­ter today about the var­i­ous parts of the beard, mostly with a chap called Phill, a new set of beard terms have been reached that I think reflect the class and dig­nity inher­ent in a fur-face.

I recently dis­cov­ered a poster on a friend’s fridge that out­lined Cuts of Beef and their com­mon uses. It was an inter­est­ing chart that taught me which parts of the cow are which in rela­tion to a mixed grill.

It’s a nice poster with some nice typog­ra­phy and, unlike the real-life ver­sions in an abba­toir, not dis­pleas­ing to the eye. How­ever it was when I viewed the poster on the side that I started to think not about beef but about rabbits.

I hope you too can can see the rab­bit inher­ent in the illus­trated beef. And so the poster of beef cuts failed to do its job because all I could think of after­ward was rabbits.

And just as I’d thought, if you place the Beef Rab­bit along­side other rab­bits it becomes indis­tin­guish­able from those other rab­bits. This has raised a lot of ques­tions for me. Was the Cuts of Beef poster try­ing to be sub­lim­i­nal about some­thing? Are rab­bits cows? Are cows rab­bits? Rab­bits are, when you think about, steak-sized. Mmm. Food for thought.