Haircuts the Mighty Men & Monster Maker Way

When I was a lad I served a term as an office boy in an attorney's firm.

I also had a toy called Mighty Men & Monster Maker. The idea was that there were different tiles in three different regions that you could mix and match, and then trace over the tiles to make either a monster or a superhero... or some combination. A werewolf head on a superhero body? Sure. Frankenstein's monster with a werewolf head? Why not. The pieces lined up in certain ways, but were independent of one another beyond that.

It was great fun, and it helped me think early on about permutations.

I was reminded of this venerable toy during my trip to Australia. Specifically, I was reminded of it because of many of the haircuts that I saw on Aussie guys.

(As a quick precursor: I don't care about hair that much, especially on guys. My hair does what it wants, for the most part, until I decide to get most of it hacked off. I don't have a particularly good sense of what looks good or bad, so when I bring this up it's not to be snobby.)

Most people have haircuts that ... go together. By that I mean they have shaggy hair, or short and spiky, or parted, or whatever. Bad haircuts and good haircuts both tend to have an internal consistency.

In Australia, that concept seems to be much less common.

Sure, there were many men who had haircuts that looked "normal"... even if the haircut was extremely punk or otherwise out of the mainstream, at least it was normal.

Some, though? They had "Mighty Men & Monster Maker" haircuts.

By that I mean their scalps were seemingly divided into different zones (think a vertically oriented Berlin after WWII, perhaps, or look at the image that I made to simulate it)... and each zone could be entirely unrelated.

One guy had spiked short hair in the "red zone", long flatted hair spilling over in all directions in the "blue zone", bushy hair in the "green zone" and then long, straight hair in the back.

The next guy had long/straightened/flat, spiked short blue, medium, then short and curly in the back.

So many permutations for confused hair.

I was looking for rhyme or reason in the hairstyles I saw. There was none.

Similar, I suppose, to starting off a blog post about Australian hair with lyrics from Gilbert and Sullivan.