The Great Brooklyn New Year’s Massacree
Jan 5
All is not well.
I was recently the victim of a great fraud, resulting in serious bodily harm and likely permanent psychological trauma. I believed things told to me by people I respected, and relied upon advertising text promulgated by a corporate entity consumed, without my knowledge, by depraved indifference to human dignity. Misled by misrepresentations beyond my control I acquired - as a Christmas gift, no less - a device so dangerous and of such shoddy design as to constitute a willful malfeasance in and of itself, and employed, in good and unsuspecting faith, that device upon my person to woeful and grievous consequence.
Having been misinformed by positive reviews of this device, obviously written by persons concealing a deep self-loathing, and by the text prominently displayed on its box asserting “You Can’t Mess This Up!”, I took it upon myself to use the diabolical instrument in the manner prescribed, and did thereby mess it up.
I post this as a warning to all others deceived by transient dreams of efficiency and cost-savings: Do-It-Yourself Haircuts are Not a Good Idea, no matter what it says on the box.
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#1 by tgirsch at January 5th, 2009
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I think the Fiasco tag was intended for the book of the same name, but hey, I think this qualifies as a mistake of W proportions!
#2 by KTK at January 5th, 2009
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My mother said I should wear a burqa.
#3 by tgirsch at January 5th, 2009
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Did you use a guard? I’ve actually done the self haircut a couple of times, and it wasn’t quite so disastrous. (Though I was very conservative in how much I cut off…)
#4 by KTK at January 5th, 2009
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The clipper is the Remington “Shortcut”, which has a curved clipper head and an adjustable-length guard. Supposedly, this keeps the clipper at a uniform distance from your head, so you don’t get a tangential cut with a flat clipper on your curved head. And supposedly this makes it foolproof. But that really doesn’t help much at all. Your head is not uniformly curved, and the clipper is a little too wide, so it just gives you a different kind of non-uniformity (and makes it harder to go back and do touch-ups).
The real problem is that the length settings are very short - the longest one is 1/2 inch. I honestly thought “Shortcut” meant something like “shortcut around a trip to the barber” - in fact, it’s a literal description of the type of cut the trimmer is supposed to make, which I didn’t realize until I tried to use it. It only produces very short cuts. Now, I wear my hair short, but not 1/2 inch - and that means that the sides and back will be even shorter, so the skin shows through like it’s your first day in boot camp, and any unevenness shows up as very patchy and ragged. And, of course, you can’t see what you’re doing.
I would never have tried this if I hadn’t been assured that it was essentially automatic. It’s far from automatic, and I’d never done it before, and you have to do it blind, so, with one thing and the other, I’m not entirely chuffed with the results.
I suppose I’ll let it grow out for a couple of weeks and try it again - some people have said it works great for them, and if it does work for me it’ll save me scads of time and about $40 a month. So what if it I have to look like I just got visited by the Lice Nurse for a month or so? It’s not like my social life is going to get any worse.
#5 by digglahhh at January 6th, 2009
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$40 a month, KTK? Holy John Edwards, Batman. Do you go to a salon? Do you get more than one haircut a month?
I mean, if you’re willing to take a shot with the desginer Flobee, then couldn’t you just find a cheap barbershop. My haircuts cost me $10 a pop, I get to look at Playboys and if it is near closing time, my barber usually offers me a scotch too. I give him a five dollar tip, and get my haircut about once a month. This is not somewhere pinching pennies is necessary. Plus, your hair is something people see everyday (even on me, and I’m addicted to hats) - just bite the bullet and have it done by a professional.
If you choose to remain stubborn, you could get one of those shower shaving mirrors with the suction cups and place it on the bathroom wall behind the regular mirror while you use this monstrocity - at least you won’t be going at it totally blind.
You also really look like a friend of mine in the forehead up headshots up there. It’s kinda funny. Though he recently got kicked out of rehab, he never got high enough to think he could cut his own hair. Sorry, I had to throw one in there.
#6 by KTK at January 6th, 2009
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I pay $15 and give a $5 tip. No Playboys (hair stylist mags - not the same). Scotch? - you’re kidding! I try to go about every two weeks so the hair stays the same length - with short hair, if you go only once a month you imitate a Chia Pet.
But it took me 6 months of crappy cuts at every barbershop in my neighborhood (the word for “No” is the same in English and Spanish, so why do they keep cutting my fucking beard off?) before I found a guy I like in a completely different borough. That makes getting a haircut at least a two-hour undertaking, and I can’t always squeeze it in. If I can do it at home, I can trim it exactly the way I want it, at any time, and save the money to boot.
If . . .
#7 by digglahhh at January 6th, 2009
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Well, I’ve been going to the same guy for years. Sometimes if I get there late, I’ll just wait to be his last customer and then I’ll stick around with him while he closes up and have a drink and talk sports or current events. He keeps a few bottles at the shop.
There are three barbers in the shop. The main guy, some woman (who does so little business I don’t really understand why she continues to show up ) and a rotating guy next to the main guy. My guy has had trouble finding a reliable second barber, for about a year nobody held the chair for more than two months. Recently, a second barber stuck for a while. A lot of customers will only go to the main guy and will wait while the other guy stands over an empty chair. As an act of good faith, I started going to him sometimes. It’s only a haircut anyway. Well, last Friday I was off and I went. Regular second guy wasn’t there and my guy was busy, so I tried my luck with the random replacement - and wouldn’t ya know - the fucker cut my beard off!…
Well, not entirely off - just the neck part. It’s no big deal really. I’ve worn my beard both with and without the neck part in the past, but it is funny you mentioned the neck thing. Many Latin barbers seem to assume that all their customers want to look like Puerto Rican teenager…
#8 by tgirsch at January 6th, 2009
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I’m cheap, apparently. I pay $15 and give a $3 tip. Then again, cutting my hair isn’t rocket science. #6 on the top, #4 on the sides, done in less than 5 minutes. (Fewer than five minutes? That doesn’t sound right… Maybe I should just say “under” 5 minutes…)
#9 by KTK at January 6th, 2009
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“Less than” for divisible quantities, “fewer than” for countable quantities. You can have partial minutes, so it’s “less than” 5 (but not necessarily exactly 4, 3, 2, 1, or 0 minutes - it could be 3 1/8 minutes, or 2.7 minutes . . .). You can have a number of apples below 5, but (normally speaking) you won’t have 3 1/8 or 2.7 apples, so for any quantity of apples restricted to 4, 3, 2, 1, or 0, it’s “fewer than” 5 apples.
Your haircut takes less than 5 minutes, during which time you could eat fewer than 5 apples.
My haircut took more than 5 minutes, and sucks hugely.
#10 by tgirsch at January 6th, 2009
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Yeah, but I can count minutes, like on my cell phone bill. They round ‘em.
In any case, I don’t think “divisible quantities” is quite right, because you can have half an apple. My understanding is that “less” refers to volume or degree, while “fewer” refers to number (particularly but not exclusively discrete number).
I think minutes gets “less” because it’s an extension of time, which is abstract enough to not normally be counted. At the same time, however, I would say “I worked fewer hours this week than last week,” not “I worked less hours.” So to me at least, the rule seems fuzzy with respect to time. Dvorkin, get your ass in here!
#11 by digglahhh at January 7th, 2009
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I think minutes gets “less” because it’s an extension of time, which is abstract enough to not normally be counted. At the same time, however, I would say “I worked fewer hours this week than last week,” not “I worked less hours.”
For what it’s worth, that was going to be my point.
I’ve thought about the less/fewer minutes thing too and sort settled on the perspective above.
In the second sentence though, TG, you are counting the unit of measures themselves, not using them as a metric to make a statement about the more abstract concept they measure.
It also think it works because what you are counting, both time and the minutes themselves are not tangible things. For example, we refer to different temperatures by saying hotter or colder, not by counting degrees. But, assuming we did: heat to 300 degrees or less feels less awkard sounding than 300 degrees or fewer. Right? Because you are actually talking about hotness or coldness.
Perhaps there is an exception for units of measure.
While not as abstract as time/minutes or temperature/degrees, even volume/ounces seems to sound okay. “I drank less than five ounces” sounds better than “I drank fewer than five ounces.” Now, if you flip it to something tangible, then it’s no dispute - fewer than five drinks, not less. This is similar to the “less than five minutes” vs “fewer hours” example.
#12 by Dan M. at January 7th, 2009
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Actually, you can use ‘less’ quite indiscriminately and tell the grammarians to fuck off: http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/003775.html
I think the usual distinction is called “mass” and “count” nouns, which is a grammatical feature, not a semantic one, though there is some correlation with semantics. That is to say, it’s like the gender of a word in Latin: there’s a standard “right” answer for each word, but it doesn’t actually have anything to do with reality. (All poets and farmers are feminine? War is neuter?)
Also, don’t you dare tell a mathematician that “Three is fewer than four.”.