Some remodeling work

As Dave says here, we’re remodeling this blog a bit, starting with the title image, which for the last few years has been a portrait of me at work, drawn by the fashion illustrator Gregory Wier-Quitton.

My likeness online is not in short supply. Here’s a sampling from a DuckDuckGo image search for my name:

image search for Doc Searls

Dave likes this one, from Flickr:

Lacking vanity toward my visage, I don’t like any of them.

I also don’t think it’s right to use a shot in which my head still had enough hair on top to comb. Until my late ’60s, I thought I was free of the family curse (on my mother’s side), but then most of it fell out as if I was on chemo. While it’s true, as Dave says, that I’ve had hair for most of the time I’ve been blogging—and for the much longer stretch of the time I’ve been writing—the simple fact is that I no longer look like I did when I needed a barber. Also, in 2017 my eyelids were surgically exposed by removing the forehead that was falling down into my vision and squeezing my eyeballs out of spherity. (This was a medical move, not a cosmetic one.) This also altered my look.

Somewhere in the oeuvre of Fran Liebowitz, she advises readers worried about their aging faces to confront a mirror and realize this: “It only gets worse.”

With that and the spirit of whatever-based renovation in mind, does this blog need an image of me on top? I could fill my screen and yours running down a list of fine blogs and newsletters that don’t feature their authors’ image in a header—or anywhere except maybe an About page.

I love how Dave’s blog is titled with self-replacing images from his own library. If we were to do that here, I have 6 TB of photos we can choose from, with more than 66,000 of them on Flickr alone.

There are lots of possibilities. So, I invite recommendations.