Fran Healy’s fauxhawk was the very first of it’s kind I ever saw way back in 1999 – and I remember thinking it was a pretty cool idea. Much better than this trainwreck, anyway. By the time Travis played Glastonbury that year, the DVD recording of which is still my favorite concert film evah, it had grown an inch and been dyed red – but it still worked really well on his small, pea shaped head. He was even voted best haircut of the year. Jesus, they were a great frickin’ band. What the heck happened?

How this funny, creative and quite likely accidental little idiosyncrasy evolved into the phenomenon it has in 2005 is a friggin’ mystery to me, dear reader. I counted no less that seven of them during my walk home through downtown Boston this evening. Men, women, babies and long haired pets have all signed on for this silly little fruity fad. 20 years from now, fauxhawks will be what pink leg-warmers and skinny ties were to the 80’s. R.I.R. – Retarded in Retrospect. And since I’m in the business of coining phrases this week, I’ll admit it: Yes, folks – I’m a flagrant fauxmophobe.

Despite a convincing performance over the last five years, my parents don’t really want to spend their golden years in a Florida trailer park. And I’ve written several times about how my inexplicably and suddenly uber-liberal father has foiled the evil President Bush, taken his money out of the flailing stock market, and secured it in a house. They bought the 2-acre parcel of land on the banks of Ontario’s Big Rideau Lake just outside of Portland back in 2000 – and finally, after painful battles with the lake nazis, 2 sets of blueprints and a rash of violent sobbing, there’s an actual physical dwelling in the Pye family once again.

Click here to visit the full gallery of what could be considered our first real weekend trip ‘home’ in 5 years. It was quite exhilarating, fun and emotional in between all of the parentally-requested landscaping, and I’ll be back up there again just as soon as is humanly possible. For more landscaping, no doubt.

I could be crawling along the freshly painted red Freedom Trail stripe at the Boylston T kiosk, mouth full of peanut butter and saltines with a sun-lamp strapped to the back of my head – and some twat would pick that particular moment to stroll by and declare “What’s the big deal? I like it when it’s this hot!” Well, if that’s indeed the case, please let me extend to you this invitation to die immediately in a roofdeck propane fire.

“Air conditioner? Poppycock – save your utility money and just give in to this beautiful heat. Slather yourself in Crisco and find a nice patch of incindiary North End sidewalk to lie on. Get some rays. Sure, the 16-year-old bubblegum will be liquifying straight into your hair, but I love it I love it I love it!” This girl lives in my building. And while I’m exaggerating her exact statement to me Sunday morning as I struggled to install my decade old airplane hanger AC unit, I am in no way exaggerating the sudden desire I felt to drop said 100 pounds of freon fixture on her jelly-sandled tootsies.

Maybe it’s because I’m a frostback. Maybe it’s because I wasn’t an Afrikaans tobacco farmer in a former life. Regardless, I don’t do well in the heat – and I really wish I still owned one of these.