The subject of Epic Beard Man came up at the Saturday Dining Conspiracy. So, if you haven’t seen it already, here’s the original (NSFW) Epic Beard Man fight:
I actually like it better than “The Waste Land” (which requires a level of polyglot competence in ancient Latin and Greek (which I doubt I shall ever attain) to fully enjoy), though perhaps not as much as “The Hollow Men” or “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”.
My old Norelco still worked, but the blades had gotten pretty dull. So, buy new blades, right? A good theory, except:
Damned if I can figure out the model of the old razor, It’s nowhere visible on the razor itself.
In my experience, Norelco charges a pretty hefty price for their razor blades. Like, $35 each.
I was toying with the idea of checking to see if Fry’s still had the $29.99 shaver bin and picking up one of those, but instead I tried my father’s Arcitec 1050x over Thanksgiving, and was pretty impressed with the way worked, especially on my neck (always a tricky area). Plus my parents found a newspaper* ad from Norelco with a $20 off coupon, along with a flyer from Target offering a $20 gift card for buying it (turns out, in the itty bitty tiny print at the bottom of the ad, you had to buy the Norelco Nose Hair Trimmer ($14.95) to get the $20 gift card, but I have been thinking about getting one of those off and on for a while, so I went ahead and got that too.) The heads seem well designed (though I couldn’t figure out how you open the head just by looking at it). And it has a sturdy hardcase for travel.
This is definitely a much better shaver than my last one, and even better than my last one was when it was brand spanking new. In addition to producing a lot closer shave overall, it does a lot better job shaving my neck without producing red chaffing the way my old one did (which was why I had to use disposable razors there). It’s much easier to submerge the head in hot water for wet shaving (and in fact they recommend it for cleaning the heads).
Drawbacks: The trimmer included on it is a little more awkward to use than the one on the old razor. (Then again, since I bought the separate nose hair trimmer (which works OK), I probably won’t be using it as much.) Also, once when I turned it on with the head underwater to clean it, it locked up for a minute. It worked after that, but it was a bit frustrating not knowing why. Though the induction charger works quite well, it’s much larger than just the old cord arrangement, which means it will be a bit more cumbersome to take on trips. Finally, while it does a better job on my neck, it isn’t quite close enough for me to dispense with the disposable razor for those spots.
Let’s call it 4 Stars out of 5
★ ★ ★ ★
*A “newspaper” was a series of large sheets of paper folded together upon which the “news stories” compiled by “journalists” (a sort of primitive blogger) of (usually) the preceding day had been printed as a carrier medium for print advertizing, and which were either delivered to the driveways of subscribers or sold in kiosks around town. Go ask your grandparents what they looked like.
Last night I attended two New Year’s Eve parties, then went home to shoot off loads of fireworks (I live in unincorporated Williamson County) with Dwight, A.T, and Carol, a task made more difficult by the the high winds. (It’s been a very wet December, so there was no chance of starting wildfires.)
Quote of the evening: “How far away should we be from the thermite?”
(Yes, Dwight brought thermite. We were very careful to use a proper containment system.)
The great thing about having New Year’s Eve on Thursday is that you can stay up until 2 AM going to parties and firing off fireworks, sleep until noon, wake up, ask yourself “How much of the weekend do I have left?” and the answer is “All of it, and then some!”
Here’s a Maureen Dowd column. It’s about politics (which I avoid on this blog), but I was struck by this sentence:
Even before a Nigerian with Al Qaeda links tried to blow up a Northwest Airlines jet headed to Detroit, travelers could see we had made no progress toward a technologically wondrous Philip K. Dick universe.
One suspects that Ms. Dowd has only experienced Philip K. Dick secondhand via Hollywood interpretations of his work. Yes, a typical Dick novel will have some pretty nifty scientific advances, but generally they’re places of suspicion and paranoia, where overwhelming, impersonal forces acting in a hostile and illogical manner threaten a person’s identity and even their perception of reality.
In short: Something very close to the airliner security policies we have today.
Next up: Maureen Dowd on the homespun simplicity of Charles Stross’ futures…
Having played lunch-break basketball at work a while back, I can assure you that, for a non-contact sport, basketball can have an awful lot of contact. But this is pretty extreme:
“The teams lost Dirk Nowitzki and Carl Landry early in the second quarter when Landry cut off Nowitzki on a drive, catching Nowitzki’s right elbow in the mouth, dislodging or breaking parts of five of Landry’s teeth.
“Landry was taken to the emergency room and will see an oral surgeon today to determine the extent of the damage. Nowitzki needed 30 minutes for pieces of Landry’s teeth to be removed from his elbow.”
Ouch! We know this year’s scrappy Rockets are a hard-nosed, blue collar team, but that’s taking things to a painful extreme…
I have a co-worker with a number of Spock sketches up on his whiteboard (which I actually started), with Evil Spock (with beard), Vincent van Spock (one ear), etc.
Today he said he had to erasing some of the more obscure Spocks (like one that was evidently a Babylon 5 reference) with Spocks people would be more likely to recognize.
I asked him: “Who are you going to give the money to?”
Him: “What do you mean?”
Me: “Don’t you know that there’s a hefty re-Spocking fee?”
/True story
//I’ll be here all week
///Try the veal
////Slashies usage blatantly lifted from Fark
