Today in our continuing series on how to spot an Olbyloon we present the AppearanceHypocritesRUs. Regulars here at Owatch know that the Loons put up their most passionate defenses when Clear Thinkers post about the unnatural Red/Orange hue, his dopey glasses, or his ill-fitting wardrobe. They claim we are not able to criticize him on substance so we criticize him on style.They insist that any discussions of his appearance should be off-limits here on Olbermannwatch.

But what do we have here? The Krazy Keith Cultists aka, the Galpals, regularly comment on the appearance of one Keith Olbermann! They certainly never critique him on substance but boy do they like to devote a lot of their time discussing his appearance!

And here.

And here.

And here.

And then there is this little collection of galpals which keeps daily tabs on what tie Olbermann wears.

Yet we are not allowed to talk about what Olbermann looks like? Okay, we are not following that line of logic but the Galpals have never been accused of ever making sense. And that brings us to this, the slavish devotion one particular Olbyloon shows in dissecting Mr. Olbermann and his appearance in tedious detail. We give you, unedited, the thoughts (if she can be said to actually think) of one Kathy on Mr. Olbermann and his appearance:

Seems to me that, aside from the fact that any old photo of a person will almost inevitably look dated and thus geeky to a certain extent anyway, Keith in his youth was cursed with a strange combination of features: the delicate facial features and skin of his mother combined with the hirsuteness of (I would assume, given that his mother does not look hairy) his father. This doesn't generally make for dashing good looks. In old pictures of himself where he's clean-shaven, his face appears almost too feminine or babyish...yet in pictures where he does have facial hair, it seems to be growing all over the place, with no particular rhyme or reason, and he sort of looks like the Wolfman.

By the 1980s, Keith appears to have gotten in touch with the concept of "manscaping" (even though they didn't call it that yet) and tamed his hairiness down to acceptable levels for an employed male of that era who spent much of his time appearing on TV. Yes, he looks quite Ron Burgundy to us today, but the look at least fit in with how other men of his hairiness looked at the time, and the glasses were the same kind of glasses other men were wearing then. (I get the impression the glasses really did come along as a result of the 1980 head injury, because you don't see him wearing any prior to then.) The problem? He had so much facial hair that it still disguised the "pretty" features of his face. Maybe he was afraid to let them show, having felt that back in his earlier hairless days he did look too girlish. Maybe mustaches and beards were his way of saying "Look, I'm a guy, OK?"

Finally, about the 1990s, Keith's face began to balance out...he still might waver back and forth on the mustache thing, but his features began to age just enough that they no longer seemed feminine or babyish, but simply like youthful, elegant features on a man's face. By the turn of the century, he had "aged to perfection."

This decade, Keith's hairline has begun receding and his hair has become lighter and lighter, with the gray starting in front and migrating ever-so-slowly to the back (the back still being almost completely black). It's become obvious that the man has an incredible pair of cheekbones to go with that wonderful bowed lip and dimpled chin, and without any of the facial hair in the way but with enough age now to masculinize them, they have become the elements of a truly beautiful older man's face. His eyes show much more as a result of dumping the facial hair, managing the eyebrows (as much as they can be managed) and wearing eyeglass frames that don't hide them (MOST of the time...). Bodywise, he's learned the trick of wearing suits that hide his "figure flaws"--a long, pear-shaped torso combined with proportionately short legs--with jackets that make his shoulders look broad enough to balance out the wide part of the "pear" and that are long and loosely fitted enough to disguise his bottom-heaviness (along with the right cut of pant). In short, Keith is probably in his best-looking decade right now. He's only now even starting to develop little wrinkles and creases in the past two years (note the little one about an inch long smack in the middle of his forehead) and, yes, the double chin, which doesn't really even show until he turns in profile because he has a relatively un-square jawline.

It's funny how you can look at images of people when they were younger and see how they weren't really good-looking then for one reason or another, and the reason was actually that they had not yet grown into their looks, or their bodies hadn't matured, or they were the victim of past fashions that hid their best features, or something. A good example is men who, in their youth, were "bobbleheads" (their bodies had not yet caught up with the size of their heads). Old pictures of men like these look downright comical--as teenagers, they really look as if they belong on your dashboard nodding...their heads in proportion to their bodies look absolutely HUGE. But then they get to their twenties, and their bodies catch up...and then they look perfectly normal and sometimes downright handsome.

And they call us Olbermann-obsessed?