Take a “Mullet Journey” with the BBC

A mullet with a really, really big party in the back.

Jim Nolan
2 min readSep 3, 2023
Tami Manis and her spectacular hair. Credit: Wade Payne, Guinness Books of World Records

The BBC, which reliably publishes stories about how people in the former colonies are strange beyond belief—this, mind you, coming from a nation that eats Lamb & Mint-flavored potato chips—recently had an article on a Tennessee woman by the name of Tami Manis. Manis will be featured in the 2024 Guinness Book of World Records for having the longest female mullet. It is five feet, eight inches long, longer even, than Tami is tall.

To an American, this is nothing odd. We’re a country where a Nebraska man was pulled over in August for driving his pet 2,200-pound steer in the passenger seat of his Crown Vic. The only thing shocking about it is that he was pulled over at all. As he told the police, he hadn’t been stopped in seven years of doing this. And the car’s frame had been reinforced, for heaven’s sake.

Instead, what struck me as weird was the BBC’s description of Tami’s multi-year cultivation of her hair as “her mullet journey.”

“Ms. Manis said her mullet journey began when she first watched the music video for the song Voices Carry some four decades ago.”

Mullet journey? Their words, not hers.

Generally, you do not want to be described as being on a journey of any kind. It’s not typically a journey you choose to be on. And often not one with a happy destination.

Growing a record-breaking mullet seems the exact opposite of that. I’m guessing Tami never thought of herself as being on a journey.

Heck, even the long-horned steer wasn’t on a journey. He was just taking in the sights and getting some fresh air. And maybe trying to impress the cows. “Check out the horns, ladies.” Imagine how jealous the other steers must have been, first time they saw him drive by. “What the @#$%&!”

Anyway, I hope all your journeys are to someplace fun, in a Crown Vic or Airbus A380.

And that if anyone should have to go on a mullet journey, let it be someone at the BBC.

Specifically, David Attenborough.

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Jim Nolan
Jim Nolan

Written by Jim Nolan

Jim’s humor writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Funny Times, HumorOutcasts.com, McSweeneys Internet Tendency, and on WBFO public radio.

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