Could you elaborate on why it's unfair to accuse Glenn Reynolds of wearing a toupee? In fact, since he's a self-described transhumanist and believes the future of mankind is in prostheses of infinite variety, wouldn't a toupee be almost a mitzvot?

You call still-quivering puppy pelts a "toupee"?

Woah, I have no opinion on the topic but love the syntax of the above.

It's not only unfair to accuse Glenn Reynolds of wearing a hairpiece, it's just plain dumb.

As David Letterman once reacted to a similar accusation: "I make a good living. If I were going to wear a toupee, would I get one that looked like THIS?"

Oh come on, you're paying for haircuts? You can save both time and money using the old #7 on a Wahl, maybe a 6 around the ear and a 2 for some eyebrow and neck trimming. 3-5 minutes tops, once a week or so, and it's short enough to go down the drain. Mistakes make little difference when you do it often enough, you'll catch it next week.

I've never had exactly great hair, but I definitely get more compliments this way than previously.

Don't call yourself cheap or lazy unless you really are.

"As David Letterman once reacted to a similar accusation: "I make a good living. If I were going to wear a toupee, would I get one that looked like THIS?""

Tell that to Donald Trump.

You guys are missing out. Clip it to the shortest clipper length, and then just keep the ol' Mach 3 turbo going, up and over, every two or three days.

Now, I'll grant the first sunburn afterwards is a little uncomfortable, but your scalp tans quickly enough.

At the risk of sounding snarky and in Edward's defence, you get what you pay for. He's a national figure and like it or not, image is important, so I'm not at all surprised about the $400. That's pretty standard for the top stylists. I'm sorry but to discerning eyes, a $12 cut looks like a $12 cut (in other words, cheap). It would be inappropriate for a national figure to walk around sporting a cheap, and thus nebbish, cut.

Bill Gates manages to survive.

In a free and marketplace econmy what is it anyone's business if a guy with money decides to spend 400 bucks for a haircut and can afford it? How much do you spend for a nice suit? How much do you think Edwards spends? How much does Bill Gates spend to build his home? How much do you spend? Are you a friggin commie and want us all to spend the same amount for food, vacations, suits, haircuts? get real. This is America and if we have it we spend it and ain't no one's business but ours.

US President Tim Kalemkarain, US Senate Tim Kalemkarian, US House Tim Kalemkarian: best major candidate.

Well my hair cuts cost about $45. I figure its a $20 haircut (she's pretty good) and then I pay a $25 premium to ogle cute women with funky hair and tattoos... Makes me wish I was back in school where that was free.

Good call on the optimization strategy. I figure a haircut should look its best 1-2 weeks out...

"In a free and marketplace econmy what is it anyone's business if a guy with money decides to spend 400 bucks for a haircut and can afford it?"
Excellent point. Not at all like he is campaigning on the difference between people with $400 haircuts and people without. Oh, wait.

Nice range of opinion on what constitues cheapness, laziness, and communism.

I'm intrigued by toupees as mitzvot for Glenn Reynolds. In the future, everyone will wear a toupee?

Well, certainly not everyone. Many transhumanists believe in the Singularity -- and while Glenn is cagey about whether he himself does, he certainly plugs the books of those who do, and indeed most weeks, he gets in a number of plugs for transhumanist charities, blogs, sites, books, etc. The Singularity has been described as "rapture for nerds", and is expected, according to the best estimates, by the year 2030. At that point, computers will be so powerful that they will take over human evolution or something like that, and tiny robots will appear that will fix all our bad cells that age and get sick, so a certain number of people will live forever. Since this is all bound up in libertarianism, you can be pretty sure that not everyone will live forever, but prob'ly Glenn will.

Now, a mitzvot is an act of piety, as I understand it, not necessarily undertaken with the expectation of a particular result. Circumcision for Jews, I believe, is a mitzvot, as are the numerous other observances that the religious undertake. Now perhaps after the Singularity, we will have bionic scalps reconstructed by the nanobots, or maybe just virtual scalps. So a toupee in this estimation is not a necessity, and we can't tell who will survive the Singularity, nor exactly what kind of hair or scalps we might have after them. But it seems to me that all transhumanists, in observance of the importance of prostheses, should wear toupees, irrespective of whether there is hair underneath them.

I hope this has made this matter crystal clear.

Wow, I didn't know being all bound up in libertarianism would make me live forever!

Sounds cool -- even if I have to wear a toupee!

So now you can see why Glenn is so into it.

I like the idea of living longer, and I've weighed in on singularity before:

http://www.classicalvalues.com/archives/2006/03/long_day_with_n.html

While I'm a bit skeptical (especially of how quickly this will happen), I see no rational reason to oppose technological improvements.

But not entirely convinced of the relevance of the toupee to this argument, and not just because Glenn Reynolds does not have one. In logic, whether someone is losing his hair loss is unrelated to what he says. Saying someone is bald is meaningless, because it is purely a physical characteristic. However, asserting that someone wears a toupee is often meant as ridicule, as it implies that the person is phony or insecure. To claim someone wears a toupee when he doesn't seems like a silly and false assertion, so I'm glad you've clarified your position with the additional argument that "transhumanists" should wear them anyway "in observance of the importance of prostheses... irrespective of whether there is hair underneath them." I'm guessing that's your way of saying transhumanists are bogus, and that the singularity will never happen.

If so, then there's no real reason to bother opposing transhumanism, is there?

No more than anyone needs to oppose millenarians of any sort who predict a date certain for their apocalypse. But that's no reason to say they don't still look silly gathered on the hilltop in their white gowns, waiting for the Great Pumpkin.

And I'm not sure how you know Glenn doesn't wear a rug. Still looks like a cheap one to me.

I saw nothing resembling a toupee. But then, I also missed Glenn's white gown, so I may not be as observant as I should be.

Also, I left the event before midnight. (Obviously, this was too early to witness the pumpkin!)

Here's how you check for a toupee. First, no visible part in the hair. Second, and this applies to cheap ones, it seems to be sitting on top of the forehead like a book left upside down. This is because there are no visible hairs that are coming out of the forehead with roots showing.

No part in hair plus no visible roots = highly probable toupee. Every photo I've seen of Reynolds after he dropped his Paul McCartney do (also a good sign of a toupee) looks like this.

I can see a toupee on a media figure who may feel it's important to look young when you're 55 or 60. But we expect those guys to have some phoniness in their makeup anyhow.

A law prof? Plain phony, it seems to me. Leaving out the hokey tinted glasses.

The only time I met you your hair looked fine, Eric. Maybe it was at the mid-point between haircuts?

Actually, it seems to me that the question of Glenn's toupee could be easily resolved. Glenn clearly loves to publish photos of himself -- why not prevail on him to publish one of himself on a scuba dive?

Not a law prof either? You mean we've all been duped about that too?

This is getting serious!

Never trust a man with an invisible part! (And you've also got me worried that Glenn might be guilty of rootless cosmopolitanism....)

from the LA Times...some facts on Edwards' spending:

"His $3.3 million in expenses were significantly less than those of his two main rivals for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.).

Based on his campaign reports, Edwards flies on commercial airlines and stays in chain hotels.

At a recent Bay Area fund-raising stop, he traveled with a single aide and rode in a minivan, rather than the limo or SUV favored by some candidates."

The man is constantly in the public eye--cameras, TV interviews, public appearances, etc...let him spend some money on a nice haircut.

Hey, our First Lady spent $700 on a haircut.
So what!