What with the lack of gravity making your locks stick straight up, it’s always a bad hair day in space. Our Official Website Astronaut™, Astro Sam, has short hair that becomes spiky at zero-G, making her look like a Punk Astronaut.
But the residents of the ISS are up there for a long time and must occasionally need a haircut. How do they do that? You can imagine the mess it would make unless precautions are taken to prevent hair from flying everywhere. In a recent comment, reader delta3d gave us a link to an article from The Mary Sue about how Sam gets a haircut, and there’s also a video. Of course it involves (like bathroom exercises) a vacuum cleaner.
First, AstoSam issued a bunch of tw**ts about the whole process. Apparently her American colleague Terry Virts (soon to return with Sam to Earth) has some tonsorial training, so he can keep AstroSam’s locks manageable:
And the video:
Man, Astro Sam has a seriously adorable smile.
Like I said, they need a flowbee.
Yeah I thought that right away too!
Me three! Flowbee time!
You mean a Suck Kut, right?
It sucks as it cuts!
BTW, Punk Astronaut would be a good name for a band.
On those not-uncommon-enough occasions that I have to prepare for putting on breathing apparatus as part of my wake-up-to-howling-alarms working life, I have frequently considered the idea of getting my beard electrolysed into oblivion. Permanent oblivion. Putting shaving myself outside my future cone of world lines.
The worlds of SF are full of moderately justified weird hairstyles, like the ‘Belter Crest’ (shaved head, except an inch-wide strip grown to full length) ; the asymmetric beard (statement : ‘I have the time yo look after this face junk’, often associated with one fingernail never-trimmed, saying “I don’t work”). Also the “Belter Tan” : savannah black above the neck-line of a space suit, ethnic colour below).
Does anyone have “a friend” who knows how effective (and expensive!) ‘electrolysis’ is against facial pubes?
That’s the same ‘do Javier Bardem had in “The Counselor.”
As soon as I saw this I thought of the scene of another “Sam” getting a haircut in the movie “The Moon”.
Remove the XXX from the link (attempt to make sure it doesn’t embed).
XXXmovieclips.com/S8Ls-moon-movie-gerty-gives-sam-a-haircut/
Fantastic movie!
Not exactly a pedantry, because I’m as curious as critical, but “What with… ” followed by only one example looks odd to me. For that I would use just “With…” but I can’t say why. Can anyone?