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August 29, 2006
I Love The 21st Century
Maybe I'm getting soft, but I constantly look around and wonder how people ever lived without things we take for granted everyday.
Air conditioning for instance -- I couldn't have lived in Tennessee before air conditioning, or at least I never would have slept with beads of sweat dripping into my eyes all night long. The internet and telephone, while they do cause stress and aggrevation from time to time, are invaluable.
Mostly though the things I appreciate about the 21st century have to do with hygiene. I would not like to have lived before toilet paper. Consider this from The Straight Dope:
"You may not believe this, but it was once common practice in rural America to leave a corncob hanging from a string in the outhouse for purposes of personal hygiene. The string, I gather, was to permit the cob to be reused. For those who were punctilious in these matters, or else blessed with an abundance of corncobs, a box of disposable cobs might be provided instead. In coastal regions, the cob might be replaced by a mussel shell.
For those who had access to it, paper from discarded books or newspapers was often preferred to either of the foregoing. The meteoric growth of the Sears Roebuck company, for instance, is thought to be partly attributable to the protean nature of its catalogs, which, historians tells us, might serve a family of regular habits for an entire season. As with the cob, the catalog would be hung in the outhouse on a string and pages torn off as needed. It is said the use of coated stock, which was nonabsorbent, was a source of great consternation to farm families when Sears began printing color pictures in the catalog earlier in this century.
English lords, in attempting to teach their sons to be cultivated gentlemen, often advised purchasing an inexpensive volume of verse for use in the loo. The idea, of course, was that while you were sitting there in a contemplative state you would be able to read a few stanzas, subsequent to which the paper could be put to other ends, so to speak."
I also really like Q-Tips...I mean really like Q-Tips; I can easily use 10-12 Q-Tips a day.
So imagine my excitement when I finally figured out what this attachment for my Norelco trimmer is for:
It's a nose/ear hair trimmer!!! I am not feigning excitement here either. I have some serious nose hair, and up until now dealing with it has been an ordeal. You can of course use small scissors, but it's hard to cut your nose hair when a) you can't see it and b) your nasal passage is barely large enough to open the scissors at all.
So then I began pulling it out. It's not as painful to me as it is to some (see Jean Jeunet's short film Fountaises), but it doesn't feel good, and since you can only grab the hairs that are already sticking out of your nose it becomes an almost daily ritual as the hairs that only a day or two before were out of reach start protruding from your proboscis.
NO MORE!!! I now have a nose hair trimmer! One small step for man...
This is how we do it:
| By Joshua Daniels | 1:41 AM