6. Take your time shaving, concentrating all your attention on the divine task at hand

7. Find your master's dead body. You didn't notice he was killed because you were shaving

8. Vow revenge

9. Rinse off any excess foam

10. Dispatch leaders of enemy shaving academies one by one

11. Realize that your bloodlust has driven you to violate the very shaving principals you had trained so hard to learn, yet never understood

12. Apply a generous amount of skin-soothing aftershave because it's gonna sting pretty bad until your face gets used to its top layer getting scraped off.

So if you master those techniques, and also don't apply any of that care or expensive balm to shaving with normal razors, yes. You can absolutely get a better shave with a straight razor. But barring that -- and especially if you are having someone shave you instead of doing it yourself -- get ready to bleed a lot. If you don't believe me, just ask the many, many, many Freddy Krueger-looking guys who decided to get a straight shave one day because they saw it on TV.

Just try to resist, especially when it is backed by such pumping music.

That isn't to come down on people who really like shaving with a straight razor: I like doing yoga even though it's time-consuming, expensive, painful, and I look like an idiot doing it. None of those are good reasons to stop doing something you think might make you feel good and/or get you laid. What I am saying is that in Skyfall, Naomie Harris shaves Bond with a straight razor and says, "Sometimes the old ways are the best." And I have no idea what the fuck she's talking about. Unless that's a total non-sequitur that has nothing to do with shaving, that makes about as much sense as "upgrading" your car to a luxurious horse.

Or, upgrading your new car for a "classic ..."

But aren't new cars built like plastic toys that will just crumple up in an accident? Don't new cars break all the time? Aren't new cars for dumb babies who don't know the value of a good thing so we can feel superior to them?

In a word: Nah, brah. Newer cars do indeed get more damaged in an accident, but that's done by design, not because they're made out of Ninja Turtle plastic. (Though, honestly? Would buy that car.) Prior to about 1970, cars were made with strong, rigid skeletons that were designed to stand up to as much strength as possible without deforming; it's true that they were built like tanks.

But what weren't made out of a strong metal skeleton were the fleshy people inside the car. The fact that the car didn't deform in an accident meant that it didn't absorb any of the force of the collision. Instead, it transferred all that force directly to you, the customer! That meant that there were fewer customers around.

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So many innocent wallets lost.

In 1967, Mercedes came out with the first production car to feature "crumple zones." These were parts of the car -- the parts without people in them -- that were designed to crumple on impact, absorbing a ton of energy and improving the survivability of crashes. The fact that you aren't driving a car built out of I-beams put together like Lincoln Logs means that you're a lot less likely to get sharp steel through your head in an accident.

There is a reason you might legitimately prefer classic cars other than their good vibes (not during a collision). And that's that they are a lot simpler. Clearly, being simpler means that they lack some of the nice advantages of modern cars (like, say, anti-lock brakes) but it also means that they can be fixed with less specialized knowledge and a basic set of tools. But that's the one virtue that runs completely counter to how they're sold to us in popular culture: Nobody in Fast And The Furious 9: 9 Fast 9 Furious is drooling over the '70 challenger thinking, "Oooh boy, I'm going to need so little knowledge to know how to fix this! Plus, I'll save some money on simpler repair jobs, which will help offset the single-digit MPG ratings."

That means they run based on the same basic principals that watches have run on since they were invented. There's no battery, just dozens or even hundreds of fastidiously crafted, tiny mechanical pieces, engineered to fit together perfectly. It also keeps time about one-tenth as well as a $10 watch from the gas station.

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About five cents of which was spent on its classy design.

Yes, to anyone who doesn't care about romanticizing obsolete technology, a cheapo quartz mechanism is better than a mechanical watch in basically every way. They keep way better time, don't have to be tended to 100th as often, are simpler and cheaper to service or replace ... If what you really care about is making things run on time, a mechanical watch is just one more thing for you to be fussing with instead of making sure your nefarious plans are in order.

But watch enthusiasts insist that people of "discerning tastes" will go for the mechanical watch every time, because ... uh ... they're more "interesting" (despite the fact that most mechanical watches have an opaque casing, so you'd never know the difference unless you cracked the thing open) and "have history," even though factories are stamping them out faster than free speech in Russia.

The truth is, few of us need watches at all anymore since our phones are never out of reach, so watches are just a fashion accessory. And for the vast majority of these fashion accessories, you'd never know whether the mechanism was mechanical or quartz by the look of it, so meticulously engineering all those tiny sprockets is an enormous waste of effort and money. The only advantage they have over quartz is that they'll survive an EMP blast and planning for that is some serious supervillain shit.

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Soon we'll be running our supervillain lair from our wrist anyway.

For some people, the appeal is just snobbery: a way to show that you're rich enough and stupid enough to waste a literal boatload of money on something virtually useless. But other people just fucking like watches, and they don't have to explain that to me or anybody else. Who am I to judge? I prefer Javier Bardem over Jeffrey Dean Morgan even though he's more expensive, and I probably can't really tell them apart. I just ask that we drop the pretense that they're somehow cooler or more discerning than the rest of us. Nobody's more discerning than me, a man who once consumed nothing but bottom-shelf whiskey for 40 hours.

The point is that when you see a character with a fountain pen, it shouldn't be taken as a sign that they can afford the finest money can buy, it should be taken as a sign that they really care about calligraphy for some reason. On the plus side, a fountain pen is something you can pass on to future generations so they can also be inconvenienced by it.