VIDAL SASSOON CAN REST EASY TONIGHT

After being together for 16 years, I found out something new about my wife last night.

...She can NOT cut hair.

Oh sure...she may tell you that she can cut hair. And she may give it the ol' college try by putting wisps of hair between her index finger and middle finger and snipping away.

But she doesn't have a clue as to what she's doing. She may as well be putting a car engine together because she's getting the same results ... total disaster.

Luckily, I'm not sharing this as the disgruntled victim of her haphazard shearing.

Nay...it is my son who's going to get picked on at daycare today. I can imagine the cruel insults the boy will endure today ... "Hey Bowl Head!" "Yo, did your Mama cut your hair and if she did, is the bitch blind?" and of course "Sling Blade".

Yes...my son looks like Billy Bob Thornton from "Sling Blade" now thanks to my wife's sloppy method of cutting hair.

It wasn't going to be this way. I suggested that "we" cut Andrew's hair last night. The kid is 20 months old and has really only had a few locks cut from the back of his head in all that time. It's taken him 20 months to get to the point where we thought he could use a little off the top.

Susie's suggestion was simple ... put the kid in my lap and she'd snip away.

I suggested putting in one of his tapes so that his head would stay still as he stayed focused on the tape. A brilliant idea if I may say so myself.

Now then, in Susie's defense ... she left work early yesterday because she was more congested than the traffic of people coming in and out of Anna Nicole Smith's bedroom on a Saturday night. She had taken a literal shitload of decongestants yesterday and last night and was pretty damned loopy. Loopy to the point that she wouldn't shut up about how good the soup was that I had made her when I got home last night.

"It's Campbell's Chicken Noodle, hon," I said. "It's out of the can. It's the same shit you've eaten all your life."

"But it's sooooooooo good," she said, slurping the chicken-flavored water down in her drug-induced haze.

So anyway, without really thinking about her impaired judgement, I let her start cutting his hair.

She took a few snips from the top. A few from the side. A few from the back.

"Done!" she exclaimed, backing up to marvel at her creation.

"Not even close!" I exclaimed, making the universal gesture for "Hand me the damned scissors, please."

It was my turn to work damage control. She had only cut a snip here and a snip there so that most of his hair was still long...just certain chunks of it were missing. He looked as if he had somehow contracted mange.

So I went around his head, trying to even his hair out, which was almost impossible, because he was REALLY getting into his tape and kept jerking his head around to see my reaction to puppets on the screen that were building a banana split. Usually I would pacify him with looks of feigned amusement but I was trying to concentrate on not shearing off his ears or gouge his eyes out with these scissors, so he wasn't getting the normal reaction from me that he was used to.

Finally, I was finished.

Now the kid has gone from looking like Billy Bob Thornton to looking like the illegitimate son of Phil Collins.

And I can't decide which is worse.

After two weeks, I can honestly say that I only miss not having internet access at home in the wee hours of the morning.

This is when I'd normally be checking up on other diarists and checking my stocks and downloading doctored photos of fake celebrity hermaphrodites.

Now ... each morning I sit down, open up Word Pad, type this rambling malarkey out and am done with the home computer for the day.

But it's nice in the evenings to not be lured to the computer to come waste an hour or so surfing the web. Instead, I get to watch HGTV with the wife.

For those of you totally out of the housewife loop...HGTV is Home and Garden TV...24 hours of shows that can make a guy ask "Why in the hell are we watching this crap?"

Last night, we watched some show called "House Hunters". Basically, it's some schmoe looking to buy a house and this is a 30-minute look into their life and adventures at looking at houses.

It's followed by "Peeling Wallpaper" where you sit and watch a piece of wallpaper slowly peel away from a wall for 30 minutes.

And trust me...the "Peeling Wallpaper" show is MUCH more interesting.

About 15 minutes into watching this yuppie couple trying to find a crackerbox to live in, I had to ask.

"Why in the hell are we watching this crap?"

Susie informed me that this was a "good" show. Oh yeah. I'm sure the Emmys will be thrown point blank at the faces of the creators of this show come August or September or whenever the hell the Emmys are thrown at people's faces.

These people finally decide on a home that was smaller that my last house, which I thought would have been an impossible feat to accomplish. The only home I've ever seen smaller than my last house belonged to some Fisher Price people.

Finally, the show ended with these people squeezed into a closet and calling it their living room. This was so intriguing and exciting that I deemed it necessary to scratch my balls in appreciation for being allowed to watch such an enthralling show.

The problem is ... ever since the Mrs. got me watching "Trading Spaces" on Saturday night, she thinks she can bombard me with these other wuss-assed shows that revolve around putting fake ivy on top of your kitchen cabinets for 30 minutes.

No thanks.

Give me "Trading Spaces" any day.

At least the men on that show are straight.