I am pleased to announce that I've recently upgraded my shaving technology. Before this I was using a red Mach3 Turbo that my mother gave to me, which worked well enough. Prior to that I was using a Mach3, which was indistinguishable from its successor except for a lack of redness and failure to incorporate the word "turbo" into its name. Also, it seemed slower.

But I'm now the proud owner of a Gillette Fusion PHANTOM, the most advanced piece of face-grooming technology yet wrought by man. It contains a motor, a microchip, and, at last count, SIX blades. From the name I infer that it also possesses some sort of Active Stealth technology.

As astounding as this all is, it's true that the PHANTOM is an evolutionary product as much as a revolutionary one. The motor, for instance, is not new: the Gillette M3 POWER was the first razor to leverage the key "let's make the user's hand shake" insight. But that was the rare technology for which I was not keen to become an early adopter.

And yes, I know what you're thinking. You're going to send me a link to this Onion article. Ha-ha. Very funny, you goddamn Luddite. If it was up to people like you we'd still be scraping our faces with oyster shells, squatting in the mud and waiting for the day when hyperintelligent bees conquer the earth. No thank you.

If you want to escape the prison of your anti-scientific prejudices, I highly recommend that you visit the educational website that Gillette has established. There you can explore the futuristic lab where Gillette razorologists continue to probe the furthest reaches of beard physics. Your virtual guide will be the brilliant and surprisingly slutty Dr. Cassandra. Her come-ons become more intense with each click of the mouse, as Gillette's computers note your continued attention and furiously recalculate the likelihood that you can be fooled into buying a razor on the off chance that doing so will lead to sexual intercourse with a Flash animation.

Things really get crazy once you enter the Holosphere. I won't say anything more, except to encourage you to exercise caution: as with any holo-technology, there is always a small but real chance of cowboys, Nazis and/or literary villains escaping from the simulation and running amok.

I'll leave you with this sample of the high-quality educational resource that awaits you. Who are you to resist?