Herculodge

From 2 Dollars a Razor, to 10 Cents and a Superior Shave

I should emphasize that the Great Watch Experiment that transitioned me from Mach 3 to a Merkur Barber Pole 38C, allows me to buy blades for 10-12 cents per blade, vs. about 2 dollars or more for Mach 3s and similar cartridge razors. That fact alone makes the transition compelling.

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The Man Who Loved Radios Too Much, Part Two: Where the Hell Am I?

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For many days I coddled the Tivoli PAL as if it were my lifeboat, my mothership, my Very Center of His Being. But one night my wife Julia exclaimed that my snoring was particularly vociferous, conjuring images of a hibernating bear,  and she insisted I sleep on the living room couch. I took my Tivoli with me into the living room, placed it on the coffee table and in darkness I tuned for a station that would keep me company that night. In doing so, I discovered one of the Tivoli’s shortcomings.

It was the analog tuning process that made me realize that the Tivoli was not the panacea I thought it to be. With no digital read-out, I could not be sure what station I was on. This was particularly problematic when I landed on a station during its commercial break. I found myself anxiously waiting for the radio host to come back and identify himself or for some radio identification to be announced to let me know I had landed on Home Base, but these long waits filled me with consternation and I felt like John Robinson, the morally upright father of space travelers from the television program Lost in Space, becoming untethered from the cord that connected him to the spaceship so that he was floating aimlessly in some obscure galaxy. Where the hell am I? I asked myself, angered that I was wasting several minutes listening to commercials for a radio station that I may not even want to listen to. I must have looked like a pathetic fool, my hand groping in the darkness for the tuner dial as I scanned the AM and FM dials looking for a station I could call my home.

Even if I did find a safe landing spot, if the station changed hosts in the middle of the night, I would have to go through the excruciating process of tuning around the dial all over again. While this analog tuning was acceptable, fun even, during the daylight hours, I found my Tivoli was an unworthy nighttime companion when I needed to pinpoint my station toggling as effortlessly as possible. As much as I loved my Tivoli, it could no longer be my bedtime companion. For that, a radio would have to be digital with presets.

I remembered the night he had bought my Tivoli that I had in fact seen a few silver digital radios at the electronics store—a Grundig G4000, a Grundig YB3000, and Grundig G2000, and I returned to the store the next evening to buy one of them. But when I got there and listened to their tiny speakers, I was disappointed with their lack of base and their absence of warm fidelity. Music sounded like it came from a tin can. Voices sounded like Donald Duck.

I then looked at a military field radio with a leather strap, black knobs, and a silver fascia. It was the Grundig S350, big as a giant lunch box that boldly proclaimed strength, power, and security in a world of uncertainty. The S350 was analog, I noticed, but it had a digital read-out so that I could know what station I was on without waiting through all the commercials. Better yet, the speaker sound was big and generous. Even more compelling, the S350 was the same price as the little pieces of $100 tin that produced such faint, distant sounds. The hell with those tiny digital pieces of crap, I thought to himself. I’m getting the S350.

 

To confirm I was making the right purchase, I turned to the salesman Amir, a twenty-year-old nursing student from Syria, and said, “This one produces much bigger sound than these smaller radios and it’s the same price. Maybe I should get this one.”

“Yes, it’s the best radio we have,” Amir said without equivocation, hoping to get rid of me. He must have deemed me a crackpot the way I was fondling the radios for the last hour or so.

So with Amir’s blessing of the Grundig S350, I purchased it and set it on my bedside table. I immediately realized its reception, on both AM and FM, was stronger than the Tivoli PAL’s and I felt good about my purchase. After moving the PAL to the workout room and making room on my bedside table for my S350, I said to himself, “Excellent. Now I have two very good radios. Finally, I have peace of mind and I can put an end to my radio purchases for good.” But I was wrong. Very, very wrong. 

The Man Who Loved Radios Too Much, Part One: No More Living in Darkness

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I have been an aspiring vegetarian for several years now. This longing to “go vegetarian” is rooted in several factors: My aversion to blood. My comfort in eating cereal, peanut butter, falafels, hummus, and bean and cheese burritos. My moral revulsion to violence, especially the kind I’ve seen videotaped by animal rights groups who offer lengthy footage of cows and pigs squealing and moaning before their brutal slaughters. I mention this desire to be a vegetarian because during my inner struggle to stop eating other mammals my wife Julia and I went to Lucile’s Smokehouse, a rib joint one half mile from our house, where I proceeded to eat a handsome portion of delectable tri-tip slathered with extra spicy barbecue sauce followed by banana pudding with vanilla wafers. Overcome by remorse after my carnivorous indulgence, I felt the need to “walk off my guilt,” so Julia and I walked into a nearby electronics store.

Neither of us had anything in mind to purchase. But I felt inexplicably drawn to the shelf of radios where I looked lustily at a blue Tivoli PAL radio. I was drawn to its heft and simplistic design. It was a cerulean blue rubber cube, about six inches tall, with only three knobs on the front: A giant tuner dial flanked by an AM/FM tuner switch and an on/off volume switch.  In the center of the switches was a tiny dot that glowed bright green at the peak reception point. The price of the PAL was $120. I held the radio and enjoyed the tactile sensation of the rubber in my hands and found myself suppressing the urge to gnash my teeth into as if it were a rack of baby back pork ribs. Julia gave me a skeptical expression as if to ask, “What the hell are you going to do with that radio?”

I turned on the Tivoli and could tell the sound had a depth that my nondescript radios at home could not produce. I did not know why, but I needed to own this radio. I looked at Julia and said, “I’m getting this.”   Julia shared my high esteem for the radio and gave me the green light to buy it. Shortly after, I took the Tivoli home and removed the piece-of-junk Philips clock radio that I had purchased hastily on Amazon.

With some chagrin, it occurred to me in that moment that there was nothing about this cheap, mass-produced Philips to elevate my existence, to provide me with inspiration, to feed me spiritual sustenance, or to make me feel good about myself. Why had I bought such a horrid piece of electronics? Why during my entire life did I purchase my radios in ignorance? What did these misguided purchases say about the condition of my soul?

Then it hit me: My whole life I had lived in Total Darkness. But buying this Tivoli PAL was the beginning of something special. I was burning a path for myself toward the Light and inexplicably this Tivoli radio had something to do with this journey into Enlightenment, Wisdom, and Clarity of Being.

That night as I played my Tivoli with my ear-bud plugged deep into my auditory canal and marinated in the melancholy melody of Steely Dan's "Deacon Blues," I stared with delight at the Tivoli’s tiny glowing green tuning light that told me my station was coming in FULL STRENGTH and my soul was flooded with reassurance as I slowly drifted into sleep. 

The Man Who Loved Radios Too Much, Part Three: There Is a War Going On

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No longer using his cheap Philips clock radio for home use, Graham took the hollow piece of plastic to his work office, set in a community college near Los Angeles. He turned on the Philips to a couple of FM stations he regularly listened to and got ZERO reception. He knew the little clock radio was weak at home, but not this weak. This was simply ridiculous. AM was even worse. He couldn’t receive any signals. He wondered how his beloved Grundig S350, the radio he had recently fallen in love with, would fare in his office. The next day he tried it and to his dismay its performance was seriously compromised. To be sure, its reception was far superior to his Philips’ but nonetheless something was awry. A surge of panic ticked inside his gut, and he felt the blood pulsing in his temples as he sat at his office desk, studying several websites on reception. 

Eventually, Graham stumbled upon an Amazon reviewer who explained that business offices, often constructed of thick concrete walls, tinfoil insulation, and crammed with fluorescent lights, printers, computers, copy machines, etc., produced so much interference as to disable even the best radios. 

Graham was disheartened. Up to now, his radio quest had led him to believe that he could find a radio that would overcome even the most adversarial conditions. He hadn’t given up on his quest. He did more research and stumbled across RadioIntel, a website dedicated to radio reviews and news. RadioIntel gave him hope that the Holy Grail was out there. In studying the website, which he did several times a day, he discerned the clear difference between analog and digital radios. Perhaps that was the problem. His radios were analog. He needed something digital. He then embarked upon buying several new digital radios on eBay and Amazon. He bought several Degen, Kaito, Tecsun, Eton, and Sangean models, spending over a couple thousand dollars. They all performed admirably at home, but when he took them to work their reception was seriously compromised. If anything, he discovered, the digitals performed even worse as they appeared more vulnerable to interference than his analogs. 

Graham began to fret over his radios’ “failing” more than anything else in his life. He felt his quest to listen to the perfect radio was being hampered by hostile forces and concluded that there was a war going on. Forces were at work to impede his radio listening and only through diligence could he make his counterattack. 

One day, impatient and discouraged that another batch of radios had not come in the mail from eBay and Amazon, he went to the electronics store, the same one where he had purchased his Tivoli PAL and Grundig S350, and decided to have a talk with Amir. The salesman had become a soothing presence in Graham’s life. 

But alas, the opposite was not true. As soon as Graham entered the electronics store, he saw Amir rush to his manager and ask permission to take a break in the back room. In that moment it became clear to Graham that Amir was avoiding him and Graham was overcome with shame and embarrassment because he realized then that his radio obsession had gotten the best of him. 

He needed to find a cure, he needed to satisfy himself with his configuration of radios throughout his home and work office to the point that he could lay his radio obsession to rest. But to his despair, he found he had entered a world from which there was no return. “My God,” he thought to himself as he stood forlorn in the electronics store. “My obsession is incurable.” 

The Man Who Loved Radios Too Much, Part Two: Where the Hell Am I?

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For many days Graham embraced the Tivoli PAL as if it were his life boat and the Very Center of His Being. But one night when his wife Julia exclaimed that his snoring was particularly vociferous and insisted he sleep on the living room couch, he took his Tivoli with him into the living room, placed it on the coffee table and in darkness he tuned for a station that would keep him company that night. In doing so, he discovered one of the Tivoli’s shortcomings. 

It was the analog tuning process that made Graham realize that the Tivoli was not the panacea he thought it to be. With no digital read-out, he could not be sure what station he was on. This was particularly problematic when he landed on a station during its commercial break. He found himself impatiently waiting for the radio host to come back on or for some radio identification to be announced to let him know he had landed on Home Base, but these long waits sent him into anxiety and panic and he felt like John Robinson, his favorite childhood character from the television program Lost in Space, becoming untethered from the cord that connected him to the spaceship and floating aimlessly in some obscure galaxy. Where the hell am I? he asked himself, angered that he was wasting several minutes listening to commercials for a radio station that he may not even want to listen to. 

What a pathetic fool he was, his hand groping in the darkness for a station. And if the station changed hosts in the middle of the night and he wanted to change to a different station he would have to go through the excruciating process of tuning around the dial all over again. While this analog tuning was acceptable, fun even, during the daylight hours, he found his Tivoli was an unworthy nighttime companion when he needed to pinpoint his station toggling as effortlessly as possible. As much as he loved his Tivoli, it could no longer be his trusty bedtime Guide. 

He remembered the night he had bought his Tivoli that he had seen a few silver digital radios at the electronics store—a Grundig G4000, a Grundig YB3000, and Grundig G2000, and he returned to the store the next evening to buy one of them. But when he got there and listened to their tiny speakers, he was disappointed with their lack of bass and their absence of warm fidelity. He then looked at a military field radio with a leather strap, black knobs, and a silver fascia. It was the Grundig S350, big as a giant lunch box that boldly proclaimed strength, power, and security in a world of uncertainty. The S350 was analog, he noticed, but it had a digital read-out so that he could know what station he was on without waiting through all the commercials. Better yet, the speaker sound was big and generous. Even more compelling, the S350 was the same price as the little digital pieces of $100 tin that produced such faint, distant sounds. The hell with those tiny metal scraps of crap, he thought to himself. I’m getting the S350. 

To confirm he was making the right purchase, he turned to the salesman Amir, a slender twenty-year-old nursing student from Syria, and said, “This one produces much bigger sound than these smaller radios and it’s the same price.” 

“It’s the best radio we have,” Amir said without equivocation, hoping to get rid of this crackpot customer who had been fondling the radios for the last hour or so. 

And with Amir’s blessing, Graham bought the Grundig S350 and took it home. He realized its reception, on both AM and FM, was stronger than the Tivoli PAL’s and he felt good about his purchase. After moving the PAL to the workout room and making room on his bedside table for his S350, he said to himself, “There, I now have two very good radios. Finally, I have peace of mind and I can put an end to my radio purchases for good.” But he was wrong. Very, very wrong. 

The Man Who Loved Radios Too Much, Part One: No More Living in Darkness

 

An aspiring vegetarian for several years after watching video footage of cows and pigs squealing and moaning before their brutal slaughters, Graham Hoerner and his wife Julia went to Lucille's Smokehouse, a rib joint one half mile from his house, where he proceeded to eat a handsome portion of delectable tri-tip slathered with extra spicy barbecue sauce followed by banana pudding with vanilla wafers. Overcome by remorse after the carnivorous indulgence, he felt the need to “walk off my guilt,” so he and Julia meandered into a nearby electronics store. 

Neither of them had anything in mind to purchase. But Graham, now at the age of forty-three, felt inexplicably drawn to the shelf of radios where he looked lustily at a blue Tivoli PAL radio. He was drawn to its heft and simplistic design. It was a cerulean blue rubber cube, about six inches tall, with only three knobs on the front: A giant tuner dial flanked by an AM/FM tuner switch and an on/off volume switch.  In the center of the switches was a tiny dot that glowed bright green at the peak reception point. The price of the PAL was $120. Graham held the radio and enjoyed the tactile sensation of the rubber in his hands. He felt like an eight-year-old boy in the store with his father many years ago, holding the bee-bee gun that his dad would soon buy him. He turned on the radio and could tell the sound had a depth that his nondescript radios at home could not produce.

As he stood there cradling the radio like a long-lost puppy, a loud family of four barged into the store. As they entered through the glass doors, a cold gail of wind billowed inside. Upon impact, Graham felt a mysterious force overtake him and he could feel the reptilian centers of his brain pop and flicker. He did not know why at that moment, but he knew he needed to own this radio. He looked at his wife and said, “I’m getting this.”   Julia shared Graham’s high esteem for the radio and gave him the green light to buy it. Shortly after, he took the Tivoli home and removed the piece-of-junk Philips clock radio that he had purchased hastily on Amazon. 

It occurred to him in that moment that there was nothing about this cheap, mass-produced Philips to elevate his existence, to provide him with inspiration, or to make him feel good about himself. Why had he bought such a horrid piece of electronics? he wondered to himself. Why during his entire life did he purchase his radios in ignorance? What did these misguided purchases say about the condition of his soul? 

Then it hit him: His whole life he had lived in Total Darkness. But buying this Tivoli PAL was the beginning of something special. He was burning a path for himself toward the Light and inexplicably this Tivoli radio had something to do with this journey into Enlightenment, Wisdom, and Clarity of Being. 

That night as he played his Tivoli with his ear-bud plugged deep into his auditory canal, he stared with delight at the Tivoli’s tiny glowing green tuning light that told him his station was coming in FULL STRENGTH and his soul was flooded with reassurance as he slowly drifted into sleep. 

But while his night was full of rare pleasant dreams, Graham would not know, until a few weeks later, that the Tivoli PAL was not the panacea he thought it to be.