A few of you have called my attention to this article in the Online Sun (that paragon of UK journalism) about Blair’s 16-Million Reserve, which is hotter than Tabasco in the same way that stellar thermonuclear fusion is hotter than your bathwater.

I love hot sauce, but this stuff is beyond hot. It’s pure capsaicin (the molecule in peppers that reacts with your pain receptors, tricking you into thinking your mouth just caught fire), and the “16 Million” in its name is the number of equal parts of water you’d need to add to it before the “heat” flavor would vanish.

To put it in perspective, Tabasco rates around 2500 on that same scale. Blair’s Sudden Death Sauce (the stuff I mixed into the barbecue sauce I basted last night’s chicken with) rates around 60,000. Police-grade pepper spray rates around 3 million. In short, you’d have to DILUTE the contents of Blair’s 16 Million Reserve bottle five-to-one with aerosols and a liquid carrier in order to use it as a weapon.

So no, I don’t want you to buy any for me. Keeping this around the house as an additive for making foods spicier would be like keeping a metric ton of gunpowder, along with the accompanying brass and bullets, for purposes of home defense. Sure, it’ll last a long time, but it would be entirely too easy to accidentally kill everyone in the neighborhood.

This weekend I took my New Face out for a spin. Mostly it went well — there were a few Schlockers at Fantasy Rules on Saturday who didn’t recognize me at first, and there were a LOT of people at Church who didn’t recognize me. Nobody exhibited the bad taste of the few members of the online community who’ve deigned to insist that I put the beard back. There were even a few people who said the new look is better.

I still haven’t gotten around to drawing a new avatar for myself. In the meantime, I’ll just borrow one from Corporate America.

–Howard

A couple of additional notes, per my last journal entry:

1) My sister, in true pedantic form, called me a liar. My eyebrows are still there, so obviously I didn’t shave my whole head. Oh, and eyelashes, and nostril-hairs, and those tiny fuzzy hairs inside my outer ear… getting the razor into some of those places would have been tough.

2) The kids are FINE with the new look. I hauled the whole family into the bathroom for the event, so that they could see me transform. My earliest memory of my father (now departed) is one of him grinning at me, and I’m wondering “who IS this guy?” When I was about three years old, he shaved his beard. So… I decided that I did NOT want any of my kids’ earliest memories of me to be a creepy weird one like that.

3) Yes, I may grow hair on top. How much, and what color it ends up being is a matter for wild speculation.

I shaved today. All over.

Well, not ALL over. Just all over my head. And face.

It’s been over ten years since my chin has seen sunlight without the protective filtration provided by a beard. That’s a DECADE, kids. Some of you reading this right now didn’t know HOW to read the last time I shaved my face.

Yes, yes, there are pictures.