Shaving - the manly way!

This month marks the anniversary of my grandfather’s passing and I always find myself thinking about him a little more this time of year. One of the most vivid memories I have of him is him standing near the bathroom sink, face covered in a fresh shaving cream lather that he had whipped up in a metal bowl and applied with a brush, and shaving his face with a straight razor with the precision of a master surgeon.  It’s an image that I have long associated with ‘manliness’, and while shaving a couple of weeks back with my canned foam and multi-blade cartridge razor I found myself feeling like I didn’t quite measure up to the standard that he had set for me.

I decided that I wanted to be more like the man I admired so much and I was going to get myself some real shaving gear and learn the art of the razor. I wondered if it was a thing that people even do anymore and if it was, where I would get information on the best products to buy.

Little did I know that there is a renaissance happening that is bringing back the old-school art of wet shaving and good grooming for men. With the number of lumberjack beards, flannel shirts and skinny jeans I see sported on the streets of our city, I was blissfully unaware that there is a sizeable and strong movement to bring back the look and style of the clean cut man to our culture. There are entire websites on the topic of wet shaving for men and there’s even a dedicated group of local gentlemen who are part of this shaving culture that I was completely ignorant to. The problem is that there are very few establishments in the area (that I am aware of) that carry the products needed for a fellow to begin his journey to appropriately sprucing himself up. That’s a bit of a problem.

For example, I immediately wanted to purchase a high quality double edged safety razor and some top of the line razor blades to replace my old Gillette Fusion. There are at least five stores within a stone’s throw of my workplace that specialize in women’s beauty products, but not a single one that carried anything resembling a man’s razor. A search of the entire city and surrounding areas produced the same sort of results. I ended up spending my hard earned money at an online shopping website instead of patronizing a local merchant and, as someone who works in the ever-dwindling retail industry, this caused me great frustration. I’m trying to build a better man here, and nobody will supply me with the tools!

The good news is that I did manage to buy some great shaving creams and aftershaves on my adventures, and got some great words of encouragement from some ladies I dealt with who thought it was refreshing to see a man take ownership of his appearance.  There was a common thread, though, in that most of the ladies I dealt with remarked that it was unusual to see men in shopping for more luxurious personal hygiene products. It was somehow seen as “sissy” by folks who considered themselves to be ‘real men’ and those who would have you believe that they shave with a steak knife and a bar of Irish Spring.  It would seem than in my efforts to get in touch with a more masculine pursuit I could somehow be seen by some as less manly.

It’s no wonder the men’s grooming products are hoarded in the dark corners of these shops like the adult movies at a corner video store.  What self-respecting man would want his beer drinking buddies to see him buying shaving cream formulated with Maca Root, right? Embrace the caveman culture, Malloy!
How discouraging.


I am encouraged somewhat, though, by the appearance of the old-timey barbershops that have been cropping up as of late – opened by enterprising young men who want to make the old new again. Much like the thoughts of my Granddad’s razor conjure up fond images from my past, the sound of hair clippers and smell of talcum powder bring me back to sitting in a real barber’s chair when I was a kid; listening to the older fellows talking about sports and the weather and getting a “real haircut” as Granddad used to say. It’s been years since I’ve been to a ‘real’ barber shop, and I think it’s high time I started going back to one.

Perhaps it will be these shops that lead the charge into getting us men looking more like respectable gentlemen again and less like forest dwelling sasquatches. It could be that they can start carrying the products – razors and such - that slouches like me are looking for in a bid to change the image of the modern Moncton man from scruff to spiffy?  Maybe I just keep giving my money to Amazon.ca and confusing store clerks by asking them for an alum block.

Regardless, the genie has been let out of the bottle and I won’t go back to my slovenly ways – even if it’s much harder than being a slob. Some wise business folks in the area might want to take notice of this underserved market and start bringing in some product for what seems to be a growing customer base.

As your first products, I would recommend something to stop bleeding. This razor stuff is hard.

It's Your Special Day!

Last Tuesday, my six year old son, Ronin, sprung out of bed with an uncharacteristic amount of energy at 6:30 in the morning.

“Come on Quentin! Let’s see if our toilet is green!”

He ran off down the hallway with his three year old brother in tow while my wife and I were left staring at each other with a look that could only be described as pure bewilderment.

“It’s not green! He didn’t visit us”, my son said with pure dejection in his voice.  I asked him who he was talking about and his reply was one that my sleep-deprived brain should have seen coming from a mile away – “the leprechaun! It’s St. Patrick’s Day!”

Good grief.

It would seem that somewhere along the line, my son was told that a leprechaun visits your house the night before St. Patrick’s Day, uses your facilities (hence the green water), causes some mischief, and leaves some treats around the house for your troubles. Being the quick thinking Dad of action that I am, I went downstairs to check my bathroom and found that, indeed, the water in my toilet was green –oddly, almost the same shade of lemon lime Mio water flavoring - and the room had been toilet papered by a mischievous (not so) wee man.  We couldn’t find any chocolate treats strewn about the house, though, but I assured the kids that they would likely be found when we returned home from our respective days outside the home.

These March 17 visits are, apparently, a regular occurrence in many houses every year – with some going as far as building leprechaun traps in the hopes of catching the little tricksters. Kids that have these visits every year, of course, tell my children that they should be expecting the very same thing! Either the leprechaun shows up, or I have a couple of pretty dejected kids. That’s just wonderful.

I have one question I’d like to ask; when did every single day on the calendar get some sort of overblown celebration attached to it? When I was a kid – a full blooded Irish one at that – we celebrated by dressing in green when we went to school. As I got older, we still wore the green but maybe had a shot or two of Jameson Irish Whiskey while singing ‘Danny Boy’ to mark the occasion. This Leprechaun thing is brand new to me and as someone who prides myself on my expertise with children’s tales, this completely blindsided me.

With two young children, my house gets more traffic than Magnetic Hill in the summertime when it comes to visitors. Santa Claus, The Easter Bunny and The Tooth Fairy all drop by at different points during the year. I thought that was the standard and more than enough. My kids tell me there’s a boogeyman, but I’ve never seen him – and the Sandman shows up every night, although often much later than I would like. 


Now on top of this leprechaun business, some people tell me there’s a New Year’s Fairy that visits some homes to bring a toy to good girls and boys on the morning of January 1 - after all the loot Santa drops off just a week before.  Are you kidding me?  Then there’s that creepy ‘Elf on the Shelf’ that some people have too, but that thing looks like it should be in a police lineup; not sitting on my mantel.  What’s next – the Black Friday Bear who drops mall gift cards down your chimney?

I get it, folks. People want to celebrate their kids. I do too, and there are special things I do for my boys – like always building a Lego set with my son at the end of the first day of school. The difference is, though, that I don’t tell him that the Lego Elf delivered a new set for us, only to have him start school in September and ask other kids why the Lego Elf didn’t visit their house. 

Do you see where I’m going with this?

We’re creating a world for our kids now where we seem to be trying to make every single holiday, observance or Tuesday ‘ super duper special’.  The word ‘special’, by definition, means something that is better or greater than the norm.  I think we’re getting dangerously close to turning special days into the pedestrian.  At this rate, in order to get our little guys and gals excited about something in the future we’re almost going to have to trot out a pony or a new bike every week because we’re raising the stakes so high.

Am I wrong?  Maybe I’m just an old curmudgeon who is only a few years away from repeating the story my Granddad used to tell of how he was lucky to get “an orange in a sock and one wind-up toy” at Christmas, and how we didn’t know how lucky we were to be getting all the fancy new doodads every year. Perhaps excess is the new norm and I’m losing touch?

I wonder what this will do to our children’s sense of entitlement in the future?

I know one thing – keeping up with the Joneses never used to mean scrambling home before my family at 5 o’clock to make sure the ‘leprechaun’ had dropped off some chocolate gold coins.  At least he left some for me… it wasn’t all bad.

Separating the wheat from the internet chaff

For the uninitiated, the internet is filled with a whole lot of garbage.

Where its great success is that it can offer a voice to anyone on a worldwide platform, it is also its greatest weakness in that any amount of misinformation can be spread so quickly by anyone that it quickly becomes regarded as fact. A perfect example of this phenomenon is former Playboy model Jenny McCarthy and her rabid insistence that vaccinations caused her son’s autism.

McCarthy’s claims spread like wildfire via social media and her story was shared millions upon millions of times – despite its questionable authenticity. Today, we have an epidemic of parents who refuse to vaccinate their children because they think there is a link between vaccines and autism – because a woman whose greatest claim to fame was taking of her clothes in a men’s magazine said so.

Lest you think I’m picking on poor Miss McCarthy, take a look at the popularity of conspiracy theories on the internet about everything under the sun – including the shooting that occurred in this city last summer. The sheer number of people who are trying to qualify every tragedy as a government staged hoax is mind numbing, but their videos and essays garner thousands of hits from like-minded individuals who just continue to spread ignorance. The more hits they get, the higher they’re ranked; sensationalism sells on the World Wide Web!
Since the rise of the internet, everyone is a self-professed expert on something and everyone has a ‘qualified’ opinion on just about everything – whether it’s fracking, GMOs, climate change, religion, nutrition, parenting, or one of a million other topics. The sheer amount of misinformation that gets shared on a daily basis just on my social media feeds alone leaves me dizzy sometimes. Despite all the information in the world at our fingertips, people seem to gravitate to one or two columns on a subject they read off some obscure website and take it as the gospel because it resonates with an opinion they probably already have.

The Google search engine – the most popular in the world – currently ranks its pages by the amount of incoming links that are directed to them. Basically, the more people who are accessing a page (for whatever reason), the more popular it becomes and the higher it appears on a search result. A perfect example is the Jenny McCarthy anti-vaccination situation. Because the story was shared so often through so many channels, the websites that carried McCarthy’s claims became more and more popular and rose up the search engine ranks until they would be among the first results that would appear when someone searched for vaccination information on Google. Even though McCarthy’s claims proved to be false, there is a large anti-vaccination movement now built on a lie because of the belief that “if it’s all over the internet, it must be true”.

Thankfully, this paradigm may be about to change.

A Google research team is experimenting with a model that will rank pages based on the number of verifiable facts they contain as opposed to their popularity. The more false or unverifiable facts a page contains on a subject, the lower its KBT (Knowledge Based Trust) score will be and the lower search ranking it will receive. How will it verify these facts? Through a massive data warehouse known as the Knowledge Vault – which Google has been working on for several years that is akin to the greatest encyclopedia set ever created; but is updated constantly by a computer algorithm that constantly combs the internet for verified and universally agreed upon facts.

We’re talking real Matrix stuff here, folks.

Of course there’s a segment of the population that is upset about this because “the truth is out there, man!’ and they’re convinced that shady forces are trying to keep us in the dark. They’re worried that alternate views will be squashed and everyone will be assimilated into thinking the same way and drinking the New World Order Kool-Aid. That’s the great thing, though – the alternate views won’t be removed from the internet. You can argue facts all you want and publish whatever you wish on the internet, but you’re no longer going to be provided a spotlight at center stage to do it if you’re claims are most likely a load of horse feathers.

In terms of real world application, it’d be like this - you won’t get a podium in front of City Hall anymore for your foolishness. You’ll be relegated to the far end of the parking lot at the Moncton Coliseum at 3 a.m. on a Thursday . If people want to listen to what you have to say, they certainly can go find you. It’s just that fewer people will stumble across your ranting on their way down Main Street to buy a coffee. (Not that everything that comes out of City Hall makes sense, but you get the idea).

With the shape the world is in right now, one of the few things that might get us out of this mess is knowledge. Hard facts that people can agree with and work with together to improve our way of life are exactly what we need – not people wasting their time trying to separate the wheat from the chaff as far as what is sound information, especially when undisputable facts on many topics are already out there.

The internet can be used for more than pictures of cats and posting what you had for breakfast on Facebook. Knowledge is power and it’s high time we started harnessing the knowledge of the internet for everything it’s worth. Kudos to Google for taking that first step.