On the Cutting Edge of Technology

I got a new razor the other day. That might not sound like Big News to you, but in the class of "things I've bought recently," it's more prominent. Frankly, you're lucky I never wrote that thing about the day I bought a new watch and some dice.

I'm tempted to claim that a man's razor is a highly personal and special item, but that wouldn't be true. I mean, mostly a razor is just a sharpened piece of metal I scrape across my face every morning. Sounds glamorous, desn't it? I don't spend much time thinking about my razor, really. However, I do spend an inordinate amount of time thinking about gadgets. And that's where shaving really takes off, because the good people at Schick and Gillette are apparently spending all their time trying to think of new crazy ways of dragging sharpened metal across skin.

My old razor was a three-bladed jobbie that only a few years ago I would have regarded as the height of foolishness. But it turns out that three blades really do shave closer than two. I know, who knew, right? So it was only a matter of time before the Gillette Quatro came out. It has four blades and two moisturizing strips. It gives a pretty close shave, although at this point the whole thing is getting kind of unwieldy. You need a pretty big flat surface if you want to get all four blades to hit the skin at the same time.

Frankly, four blades seems like a little much. How far is this going to go? Is it not written "For the demon shall bear a nine-bladed sword. Nine-bladed! Not two or five or seven, but nine, which he will wield on all wretched sinners"? No, wait, that's from Monty Python's Life of Brian. Sorry about that.

Of course, I don't know if this is going to be the Final Ultimate Razor. I hear Schick has a vibrating razor coming out soon, but I'm not sure what the difference is between that and a regular "electric razor". I mean, I realize that similar advances are taking place in the world of electrics, what with the automatic goo dispensers and all. But just taking a regular three-bladed razor and making it shake back and forth really fast doesn't sound so much "futuristic" as "a lot like a meat-slicer, really."

It's all just an attempt to get a clean shave without resorting to hot wax or lasers. Because I believe those things should stay in the bedroom where they belong. I did try a straight razor at one point, but I had trouble getting the hang of it. That's not really the sort of operation that rewards a lot of experimentation, you know. You basically either end up with a clean shave or a lot of fleshy bits hanging off your face. I tried checking the internet for how to use a straight razor, but what I found was mostly really peculiar porn. Apparently, straight razors are used by either really old barbers (like the creepy one near my work) or people in black latex.

Okay, I got a little off-track there. I wanted to do perform a scientific test where I shaved half my face with my old razor and half with the new one. But that seemed a little too "1950s Television Commercial" to me. Plus, it seemed like effort. The whole point of buying all these fancy razors is so that I don't have to pay too much attention.

By the way, I apologize for the lame pun in the title.