Jack Shafer at Slate Magazine has the most snarky column I’ve read in a long while about the blonding of television news readers.

It’s not so much column as it is slide show and it chronicles how much more blonde female news personalities have become. It’s not just the women since Chris Mathews, e.g., gets thrown in, but it’s mostly the women.

The before and afters for Andrea Mitchell and Katie Couric are funny as hell.

There’s a periodic table for the blonding of newscasters.

Special mention for Greta Van Sustern’s blonding plus plastic surgery.

I didn’t realize there had been books written on the blonding of America; “Big Hair” is the name of one of those books, and just the title alone cracks me up, having lived so close to Dallas, TX, the home of bleached big hair women.

Fewer than one in 10 adults have naturally blonde hair, but it’s estimated that more than one in three adult women display blonde hair. That’s a lot of peroxide, folks.

However, at the last, Shafer goes into sacred territory — big lips. He suggests that female newscasters will all adopt “Fox Lips”, a kind of vagina dentata that follows the Angelina Jolie popularity. He describes one newswoman as having a mouth that looks like two oily, red eels mating angrily. YIKES!

Post Script: point taken, mcarp