Cutting It Close

Thanks again to John for guest blogging for me yesterday in the Summer of Love. We’re down to our final weeks and I still have plenty of great bloggers posting here at 2HT, so keep your eyes out for them. This week we have:

Tuesday: Jester of Jestertunes

Thursday: Monty of The Daily Bitch

Saturday: Poppy of Poppy Cedes

Next up, it’s time to formally announce the new timeslot for SecondHand Radio. Some of you may already have seen the new banner in my sidebar. I’m moving to Thursday nights at 10pm Eastern on Talkshoe. I’ve decided to move from Sundays for several reasons. First of all, 5pm on Sunday was simply not a great timeslot as far as reaching more listeners. Many people are busy on Sundays, doing family things and whatnot. It was also nearly impossible for my friends in Europe to listen, since that came out to around 1 or 2 in the morning over there.

I think 10pm will be much more doable. It’s still way early in Europe, but the comments I got from my American and Canadian friends said that a weeknight would be better, so I took all of that into consideration and decided on Thursdays at 10.

I’ll be running a test show in the next couple of days and will announce it on Twitter. Not a long show, just want to get a feel for the Talkshoe interface before I start the regular show on Thursday night. I’ve sent out an email to a group of potential guests and I hope to hear back from them in the next couple of days.

What you may want to do before Thursday is download the Talkshoe Pro client. It’s not required - you can listen through the web interface at Talkshoe, but the client allows for a much cooler chat experience. More about that in the coming days.

I’ve been hanging around Talkshoe for the last couple of months or so, ever since Jester switched from BTR to Talkshoe and it’s generally far less fraught with technical problems. True, they don’t currently allow for music or soundbytes to be played, but that’s not a huge issue for me. There’s much more control for recording the shows and I can have hundreds of people on the line at one time. Granted, that’s not likely to happen, but it’s far better than BTR’s limit of five people plus the host.

So a couple of weeks ago, I received an email from Angelo, who is some marketing guy from Schick. You know, the razor people. He offered me a free Schick Quattro Titanium Trimmer – which I found on the web for $14 – in exchange for me writing a review of it. I’m all about free stuff, so of course I said yes. And sure enough, it was waiting for me (along with gobs of other mail) when I got back from Karlifornia.

Here’s what Angelo told me about the Titanium Trimmer in his email:

As someone with complicated facial hair and a love of gadgetry – I find this thing incredibly cool and useful.  It has a four blade razor and an edging blade on one end, and a trimmer on the other.  It’s the Swiss Army knife of razors.

Now that’s a tall order. I’m here to tell you right now that the SQTT does NOT comes with a built-in compass or nail clippers or even a machete like Swiss Army knives do. But it is pretty cool.

As someone that usually uses an electric razor (Norelco, if you must know), I waited a few days between shaves to be sure to give the Quattro a workout. My stubble is pretty thick stuff…I come from Italian stock, after all. Granted, I didn’t get the olive skin complexion of native Italians, but hey, why bitch about that now? I do plenty of bitching when I get sunburned on my ghost-white alabaster skin.

What I *do* like about shaving with a blade – or in this case, four – is the baby-smooth skin I get afterward. And if I go for four or five days without a shave (not that uncommon an occurrence) using the electric razor almost kills me. It’s like a thousand tiny little Amazons pulling my facial hair out in tiny little increments. Owch!

I don’t know about you other dudes out there, but if I’m shaving with a razor cartridge (as opposed to the electric razor) I shower first to soften up my whiskers, and then I shave when I get out of the shower. I realize that some guys shave IN the shower, but I’ve never gotten into that habit. Besides, I’d need a fog-proof mirror for the shower and I’m too lazy to find one.

I got out of the habit of using razors (for the most part) because of the obscene amount of money it costs to buy cartridges. I’ve never counted, but I probably only get around four or five shaves out of a cartridge before having to throw it out and move on to the next one. And I hate paying $350,000 for four cartridges. It’s insane. Sure, I’m probably paying for it regardless by buying an electric razor (and you still have to replace the razor discy things once a year), but oh well.

Now get our NEWEST razor with our NEWEST cartridge that has EIGHT blades!

At some point, they’re going to hit the razor blade ceiling and top out somewhere, but it hasn’t happened yet. For me, 3 blades work fine. Four blades are good, too.

The Shick Quattro Titanium Trimmer uses the four-blade Quattro cartridges, which I found online. They run $7.99 for four cartridges. That’s about par for the course these days. The trimmer they sent me came with just the one cartridge, which serves fine for the purpose of this review. And the difference is that on the OTHER end, there’s a battery-operated trimmer (battery included…one AA).

So I thought I’d get a good shave and also trim up my sideburns, which are coming in pretty thick. I haven’t had a haircut since I shaved my head last month, but it’s about time to get one.

I looked at the Quattro and started with the proper shave. A little Barbasol shaving cream slathered over my face, and a short 30-second wait to let it soak in. Then I went to town.

You can see the Trimmer above. The second photo shows the Power button – it’s the silver oval down near the trimmer end.

I found the shave to be really, really good. Nice and close and the lubricated strip really helped the blades to glide across my face. I’m a fairly quick shaver and I didn’t have any problems. When I’m using a blade razor, I have been using the Gillette Mach 3 Turbo. Yeah, I totally bought into the “Turbo” thing, what can I say? Anyway, I will say that I found the Quattro to be a superior shave to the Mach 3.

Then it was time to try the trimmer function. Again, this is something I normally do with the trimmer attachment on my Norelco electric. I turned the power on and felt the familiar hum of, well, trimmers. Then I started with the left sideburn. Honestly? Meh. It works, but it doesn’t work as well as I’d like it to.

It did, in fact, trim my sideburns, but it’s not good at leaving a nice clean cut edge. For example, I wanted to shorten my sideburns and deliberately didn’t do that with the razor. The Trimmer doesn’t trim down to the skin – it does, indeed, shorten the sideburn hairs. But it won’t leave a clean line like a razor will or my electric razor trimmer.

EDIT: My goof. There is also a one-blade trimmer on the flip side of the four-blade cartridge. This blade is used for cutting sideburns. The trimmer is just for trimming the hair. That totally changes how I feel about the trimming aspects. It rocks.

So here you’ll see the finished effect:

See what I mean? I’m sure the razor will shorten them just the way I wanted, but the trimmer? Not so much. I’ll be sticking to my electric for my trimming needs. I use it also for trimming over my ears between haircuts.

And me after my complete shave?

Yeah, I cut myself a little on the chin, which typically happens. That’s because I’m a bad boy and don’t follow the Professional Shavers Advice. They recommend only shaving in a downward direction. I shave down, then UP for a really close shave. You’re really not supposed to shave against the grain of your whiskers.

Overall, I recommend the Schick Quattro razor. Great shave. I don’t think I’d spend the $14 on the Titanium Trimmer, though. Just didn’t do the job for me.

Thanks to Angelo for thinking of me. I’ll definitely be buying Quattro blades in the future for the rare occasions when I do the “real shave” thing.

But here’s the beautiful thing…you can get a Schick Quattro Titanium Trimmer to try it out for yourself – for FREE! All you have to do is go to Trim Flixx and create your own little film. It’s fun and you can sign up for a free sample. Here’s my video:

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