Here it is at last: the final installment of my twelve-part series, Better Know a Beard. And finally we come to the man who turned the utter silliness of How Not to Grow a Beard Month into something worthwhile and—dare I say it?—noble.

Bob Voegerl is eleven feet tall,¹ and every inch a nerd. Or geek. Or possibly both. When, in my very first installment of Better Know a Beard, I speak of Wesley Clifford's "extremely talented friends", Bob tops the list. He provided the voices for several characters on Planet Retcon Radio² and co-hosts the Volcanicast podcast.³

Bob speaks entirely in haiku. Almost. Okay, that's a slight embellishment; perhaps even a downright fabrication, if not just a damn lie. However, it is absolutely true that there are many, many haiku⁴ to be found at Bob's blog, The Cynical Optimist. Seriously. Haiku. Nerd.

But Bob isn't just a casual nerd. Oh, no. He's also a professional nerd. I'm not sure exactly what it is Bob does for a living, but I can tell you that it is incredibly nerdy and, in the words of the now-defunct Barenaked Ladies, "it involves the Internet".

Last year, Bob decided that How Not to Grow a Beard Month needed a home on the Intertubes, so he purchased HoNoToGroABeMo.org and built the first version of this site, giving nine rather dubious beards a public forum in which to display their growth throughout the month of November. This year, after his mother lost a brief but intense battle with cancer, Bob added Beards4Boobs to the site, thus turning our foolish pursuit into something that we can be proud of when we pick up our razors again tomorrow morning.

Let's see: 50,000 words written for NaNoWriMo and over $2,500 raised for breast cancer research. I think it is safe to say that Bob has kicked November's ass.

Bob lives in Ohio with his wife, fish, cats, and LEGO TIE Interceptor.

¹Plus or minus 4'7".

²Check out the short story "The Hoff" for a fine example.

³I believe that Bob holds the distinction of Most Consecutive Episodes Hosted for Volcanicast.

⁴Yes, the plural of haiku is haiku. I looked it up.

In the penultimate installment of my ultimate series, Better Know a Beard, we meet our final participant from south of the Mason-Dixon Line, where the men are manly and the women will hurt me so I'll just shut up now.

Jim Van Verth wears many hats:¹ he is an author, a podcaster,² a software engineer, a husband, a father, and a beard-sporter.

Jim's podcast, The Vintage Gamer, is an exploration of the games of years-gone-by; an aural Wayback Machine of sorts, which whisks us back to a yesteryear when dice had just six sides and a person proclaiming they had wood for sheep was locked up on the spot.

Jim's book, Essential Mathematics for Games and Interactive Applications, is a rollicking tale of romance on the high seas, where every buckle is swashed and nary a bodice goes unripped. Or it may be a presentation of "the core mathematics necessary for sophisticated 3D graphics and interactive physical simulations".³

Jim lives in North Caroline with his wife, their daughter, and a little brown dog.⁴

¹This may well be a lie, as I've never seen Mr. Van Verth wear even one hat.

²A rarity in these parts.

³I get the two confused.

⁴That sound vaguely familiar, doesn't it?

Yep. At work. Move along.

Today I have the Monday-after-a-four-day-weekend blahs. Is it me, or do these Mondays have extra suck attached to them. We all know Mondays suck, but, seriously, these that follow holiday weekends and vacation seem to contain more power of blah and meh than I can seem to count.

Ah well, can't complain too much, I suppose... Not that anyone would listen, eh?

So, here's the final pic of the month showing that I, The Bearded Goose himself, is not able to not grow a beard. Not at all.

The hedge is saved at the last moment.

So here I am, getting ready for work, and I think "Yesterday was the end of the month, I'll shave some today." Realizing that I don't have the time to properly sculpt the hedge that is my face, I forgo shaving one more day. Only to find out later that *today* is November 30th!

Crisis averted.

Now though, we can work at averting another crisis. We are almost at our goal, you have today to donate just a little more. We need just about $450 to make it to our goal. Plus, if you donate that to me, I beat out Cmar!

Thanks to everyone who donated and who participated this year. And here, at last, is my final photo.

Overjoyed!

Ahh, the near to be end of another month in a year that has flown by.

So many words

Not quite the end, but so near it that it is utterly outshone by the brilliance of the finale. The penultimate day is practically useless. The patterns are established, the culmination yet to be revealed, it is marked not so much by its having been here, but by being in the way.

Yet, as compared to tomorrow, so little will have changed in our photographs. Certainly, I hope to have showered and perhaps attempted to brush my hair, engaged as I was in a lazy Sunday of NaNoWriMo omgpanicwritewrite, but that is superficial. There will be no significant change in length or coverage unless the razor's bite takes it in the wrong direction.

Beard-fuel like no other.

Any trip back to my hometown area of Cincinnati, Ohio, is always marked by feasting on local foods that I am unable to obtain in Maryland. Apart from their innate excellence and nostalgia, they also happen to be appropriate fertilizer for any crackling virility hedge. Some examples include:

*Skyline chili - the paramount example of the Cincinnati chili style, Skyline chili coneys are, arguably, the greatest food on the planet.

*goetta - not to be confused with it's vastly inferior and more widely known cousin, scrapple, well-prepared goetta easily rivals bacon as the perfect breakfast meat.

*Donatos pizza - while not a Cincinnati-specific food, Donatos originated in Ohio and has yet to significantly migrate out of the midwest. It's thin crust Hawaiian-style pizza, including ham, pineapple, cinnamon, and almonds, is unbeatable, and was a staple brain food of late-night med school studying. And on Day 29, it helps me cram for another final - tomorrow's HoNoToGroABeMo end-of-term test.

Sensation: sweet facial comfort

Palpation: deeper intercalation is a thing of unparalleled softness

Personal satisfaction rating: 4 (out of 5 Norsemen)

After spending the last hour or so reading about wavelet compression, I feel the urge to begin a long post about signal theory, integer lifting, quantization and zero trees. Fortunately for you, it's late and the topic hasn't really settled in my mind yet. Maybe tomorrow -- so watch out!

As way of comparison, my beard continues to expand. Not quite as impressive as some, perhaps, but I'm quite pleased. Almost smug.

Which I suppose will make it all the more tragic when I destroy it in two days. I'm thinking arc welder, though perhaps a blowtorch will be a manly enough method.

Modeling the almost final beard.

I must have messed up my counting recently in my titles for these posts. Today is the 29th according to the calendar on my laptop, but I'm in line to list this as day 30.

I'm not sure when/where this happened and I'm not inclined to find out. There is a veritable cornucopia of posts on this site from me. I'm going to claim the title right now as the only person who posted EVERY SINGLE DAY of this month. It's not technically true. I missed one day and posted first thing the next morning an extra post to make up for it. But I think it's closer than what anyone else may have done.

Again, I haven't checked up on any of these facts. So I may be completely wrong. So while I am going to lose this competition (guess it pays to be a doctor, who knew...oh wait, everyone knows that, don't they) I am going to claim the title of King of Beards.

I recently bypassed Mur in the donations area, which is only right and proper, but I still need to catch the next guy on the list. So I'm going to try the same trick I did yesterday (because clearly hard work and dedication needed for daily updates isn't enough to garner sponsors).

In my ears: The Memory Palace

Beard level: Lip Beard annoyance is back to maximum. Cheeks are still a disappointment...you think anyone would donate to force me to keep growing this thing into December. What if I say that each day that I get at least a $1 donation I continue to not shave, but the first day I don't get a donation I go back to my normal facial-hair level? Would the marathon after-race get any support? Would Bob continue to leave things up and running around here long enough to allow it? Who knows...

Sponsor of the day: Dave Chalker. Again, hasn't donated, but maybe the guilt of this post will get $10 out of him. Every bit helps and I know he's not going to just announce to the world that he supports breast cancer and doesn't want to fight against it, and that's what not sponsoring me would be. ;-)