So, what is Lanugo anyway?

It's a curious thing that certain entities get the cute pass. Seriously, some folks can't do anything that isn't cute. The other day the cat winked at me. It was so cute I almost had an aneurysm. But winking is a cute thing to do. Anybody who isn't a creep gets a little cuter mid-wink. That cute moment, fleeting like any other moment to begin with, can be instantly dashed into oblivion when it's accompanied by the (all-too-often) click-clack finger point that makes it obvious that the one performing the combination prizes being "slick" more than "cute."
But back to what's cute: The cat didn't really wink at me. It has some gross thing where its one eye is always kinda gummed up. And I know this. But that wink was so doggone cute anyways cuz winking gets the cute pass.

But how about cats? Could it not be that they, too get the pass. It may certainly be so. On Wednesday, returning home to an empty house, I was greeted with "Hello" by Chinakitty, the China kitty. You want to talk about cute for just a second here or what? Holy Toledo, it was the bright center of the cute universe and I was an enamored astronaut, gleefully hurtling toward the event horizon with mathematical certitude in the existence of super cuteness. And I'm not crazy, neither. Kasha says that Chinaks is always saying "Nihao" to her which tells me that cats get the cute pass in any language.

Far be it from me to massage the data into spuriousness, but it brings up a tangent that perhaps the cuteness is interacting with the unexpected. I mean, you come home, you open the door, somebody says, "Hello."

Big Freakin' Wow!

That same crap happens everyday. Maybe it's just unexpected when the cat does it. Watch, next month I'll be so sick of the cat saying, "hello" that that cute-fueled voyage through the cosmos of the adorable will seem like an impetuous detour off the AAA Triptik to the annoying. Now, Dootz, the other cat, one time Dootsy burped. Good-ness-gray-shus! Burping aint cute. I've been told enough times to at least pay that fact the lip service that repetition bought it. But it was unexpected and performed by a (card-carrying-cute-passer) cat, so... you get the idea.

Well, here's the thing: Babies get the pass. They're new, if nothing else, and as such can do little but the unexpected. I'm not crediting them with being all that original or nothing. Gosh sakes, no! They follow the same playbook as they have since cave-man time (with the exception of the inexplicably buff Bam-bam Rubble) and alls we keep gushing is, "AWWWWWWWWWWW!" Like we've never seen they're schtick before.

I mean, they all 'goo' and they all 'goo-gah.' They all say "Mama!" Seriously, every baby on every continent since literature consisted of a stick-man hunting a stick-animal has said "Mama!" And, to the Mama in question, nothing has ever been seen as so cute or has come as unexpectedly. Babies get the cute-pass. Big time! They are the kings (and queens) of the cute-pass.

But what about back hair? Back hair isn't cute. Oh, yeah? Well slap it on a baby, why don't you? Bet you five bucks it gets real cute real quick! That's babies for you. Masters of cute!

The deal with the Lanugo hair is that babies have their hubris. They devoted so much effort to cuteness for so long that some of the basics were skipped, some of the corners were cut. Case in point: they can get pretty cold in there. The obvious solution to that is to do what all the other mammals do and grow hair all over the body. ALL over the body. In India, I saw a man with Ambras Syndrome who looked like he was a werewolf or some hyper-fanatic ZZ-Top aficionado. Turns out he made a decent living by collecting people's pity and had a wife and (regularly follicle-d) kids. He couldn't jump high or smell a drop of blood from a mile away, but making a decent living for your family is practically a super-power these days, anyways!

And then there's Scotty Howard. You know what? It turned out he was pretty good at hoops without the wolf, and he didn't need all those fake, fair-weather friends anyways. He was good enough for Styles and Boof, and made his father proud as just an averagely normal geeky teenager. Besides, the wolf traveled more than Kobe! And break-dancing while on the court when the clock is still running!? Ron Artest has more respect for the game!

Whoops!

I mean babies are cute! They'll stay warm with that body hair until they can store enough body fat not to need hair anymore. Premature births often result in the baby being born with the majority of the body hair intact...Yikes! The really cute thing is that once they've outgrown the need for all that hair, little babies in-utero will get in some valuable real world skills practice. Um, by scraping off all that hair...and eating it. Cute!