For decades, we have been subjected to an unending string of 'cures' for the receding hairline. The mass market is flooded with creams, salves, unguents, pastes, and of course 'hair and scalp treatment systems'. Hair restorers, revitalizers, rejuvenators, reactivators, reagents, reanimators, requiring repeated reapplication are recognizably and ridiculously irrelevant. We all know there is no proof of the efficacy of these products, yet one cannot turn a page, change a channel, or click a harmless banner ad for penile enlargement without being subjected to these ubiquitous remedies.

Not to be outdone by the snake oil salesmen, the shadier side of the medical community soon jumped on the money train. Medical science has progressed to the point where body modification of astounding tastelessness has become relatively inexpensive (even cheap). As men don't really care about the size of their own breasts, and are insufficiently motivated to have fat removed from their thighs with an industrial vacuum, a way had to be found to encourage men to spend exorbitant amounts of money on invasive procedures with unknown side effects. Enter hair transplantation, stage left.

Incidentally, has it occurred to anyone else that liposuction has to sound like getting to the bottom of the most disgusting milkshake on the planet?

For a generous fee, a medical professional can remove hair, follicle included, from other, hairier parts of your body, and implant them into your scalp. Once there, it will still be ass hair, but it will grow from your head. The wonders of modern science never cease to amuse me.

Unfortunately for the follicle-ly challenged, neither of these approaches addresses the root cause of receding hair. Nor, bluntly, does either supported industry have any financial incentive to actually address the problem head on. Should a preventative therapy be developed, the duck-tors restoring hair would quickly lose their profitable market. Independent research has recently made incredible progress in this crisis by identifying what actually causes hair recession. It turns out that receding hair is most often caused by terrible television.

Television is worse than ever, yet we watch more of it today than ever before. Plots have gotten simpler, characters shallower, commercials longer, and premises even less believable. News programs no longer report on news so much as pander to our desire for titillation. Reality programming has allowed us to collectively wade ever deeper into the swamp of our greed, lust, envy, gluttony, and other sins of less catholic nature. All of this inanity, mindlessness, and greed are blasted at us from the screen; in high definition, with surround sound. Our eyes and ears do what they do, and send all of this data (I can't bring myself to call it information.) directly to our brain.

Consider the defenseless brain, as it floats there, trapped behind the eyes and between the ears. Its primary purpose is to soak in all of this data, and then, well, think about it. Modern television, while increasing the amount of data flowing to the brain exponentially has also left it with nothing substantial to think about. How much processing power do you really suppose it takes to comprehend all of the information actually contained in today's programming? After sifting out the few nuggets of real information from the flow of garbage streaming in your eyes and ears, and maybe sending you to the fridge for another beer, the brain is out of things to do. It gets bored.

In the vast majority of cases, the brain simply starts to atrophy. Without sufficient stimulation of its processing abilities, the brain becomes what it resembles, an inert sponge. Some brains, however, are made of sterner stuff. Unable to stop the relentless assault of the television, unwilling to simply check out and allow the body to coast its way through life; some brains fight back. In their rage and frustration, powerless to do aught else, some brains begin to tear the body's hair out from the inside and consume it. This helps to explain why the hair recedes first at the front of the scalp, those portions of the brain, being nearest to the television, are affected more strongly and thus, earlier than those which are situated to the rear.

So, if you really want to stop the retreat of your hair turn off the telly. Or at least watch a little public television every once in a while.