Awesome, that is, except for one thing. Every human being in every one of these little cutthroat badass countries owned the exact same Ericsson flip phone, the T28. No joke. There are millions of them still floating around out there in the Earth’s atmosphere. It’s truly the people’s phone, the ultimate equalizer. Cheap enough to be bought by anyone, anytime, anywhere.
WHO THE HELL wants a phone that literally everyone on the planet already has??
The purpose of a champion’s life is to be special. It’s to be different. It’s to be superior.
It is not to have a knobby antenna and storage for 250 contacts.
Seriously, you can own a Nokia flip phone, and we can get along, all right? You can buy an old LG or a Samsung or even a fucking Alcatel flip phone—none of them remotely interesting enough for me to write about here—and I’ll still have a tiny bit of respect for you. Like minuscule.
But if you own an Ericsson flip phone? Dude, you’re not even dead to me. It’s like you never even existed. Unless you find out my phone number, because to be fair, Ericssons do work pretty well and your calls will go through with no problem at all.
More Badass Tech Bonus Content
When the Two-Time is following his own path, when he’s running against the crowd, blazing his own trail in the arena of technological combat, he doesn’t just stop at flip phones.
Does the Doc ever stop at anything? Hell no.
So that means you’re gonna get to find out about VCRs and some other cool shit too.
Betamax VCRs
Remember these incredible machines?
Of course you don’t. You barely even know what a fucking DVD is. Well, look it the fuck up!
Back before Netflix, back before DVDs, even back before Blockbuster in all its VHS glory, there was Betamax. The original VCR tape. Smaller than the VHS tape, with longer potential runtimes and a higher-res image, the Betamax was superior to VHS in literally every way.
And it was made by Sony. Sony! The gods of tech! The same geniuses behind my experimental prototype night-vision scopes, not to mention the incredible Trinitron TV.
Yet the mighty Betamax got its ass kicked by VHS, becoming completely irrelevant a few short years after its release as VHS dominated the market.
Why? How the hell should I know? I’m not a historian.
But I keep an original Sony Betamax player in my top secret lab, right next to all my cutting-edge, advanced, multimillion-dollar audiovisual technology, to remind myself that if you let down your guard—even for a millisecond!—even the very best competitor can lose.
And also because I have a rare, first-edition original recording of Dolph Lundgren in Masters of the Universe on Betamax, which I watch every night before I go to bed.
Microwave Ovens
Fuck these newfangled microwave ovens with their digital displays and their rotating plates and their pussy-ass radiation-proof casing.
When I zap my frozen dinners, I want the complete classic all-American microwave experience. We’re talking original 1947 Raytheons. We’re talking six-foot-tall, seven-hundred-fifty-pound Cold War beasts. We’re talking a cute little bell that dings when your leftover pork chops are still frozen solid, and lymph nodes the size of watermelons from all the gamma rays.
That’s the experience I want when I’m microwaving my Orville Redenbacher popcorn for my nightly viewing of Dolph Lundgren in a blond wig and leather Speedos, all right?
Sony Discman
Now, I know what you’re thinking.
You’re thinking, “Doc, what about the Walkman? Isn’t that more iconic, more retro, than the Discman?”
As usual, your question shows just how ignorant you really are. The point isn’t to embrace shit that’s iconic. And it damn well isn’t about being “retro,” whatever the hell that means. Do you see me lugging around an old Bell rotary phone wherever I go? Of course not!
The point is to be different! To go your own way!! And to look incredibly cool doing it!!!
Any dumb skinny punk hipster can walk around with a Walkman on his belt. And why not? They’re the most revolutionary advance in portable audio of all time! They’re small, they’re lightweight, the sound quality is top-notch, they never skip or scratch, and you can drop those fuckers a thousand times and they still work. Also they’re made by my boys at Sony, who totally deserve a win after all that Betamax bullshit.
But that is exactly the problem, man. It’s too easy, too sensible, too accessible to be truly worthy of the Two-Time.
The Discman, on the other hand, is technology for the sheer sake of technology, advance for the sheer sake of advance. It’s not nearly as reliable as the Walkman: It skips. The discs get scratched. The laser gets smudged. It breaks if you fucking sneeze on it (to be fair, I have a superhumanly powerful sneeze).
But man—it looks so fucking cool. It’s sleek, it’s smooth, it’s all curves and beveled edges where the Walkman is a dumpy little box. It’s powered by its own little internal mini-laser! Who cares how well it works?? And it’s also made by Sony!
When I’ve got my original Discman strapped to my powerful thigh in the middle of my sixth set of twelve three-hundred-fifty-pound squats, I look fucking incredible, baby. So what if it skips every third note on my rare, first-edition original CD of the Masters of the Universe soundtrack, composed by the brilliant Bill Conti (Rocky, The Karate Kid, all the greats)?
Good looks, style, dominance, success, excellence, uniqueness—people, you gotta work for these things, you gotta sacrifice. Unless you’re like me and you’re just born that way. In either case, it’s Discman all the way.
Nintendo Entertainment System
Remember all that stuff I said about how you gotta work and sacrifice for everything?
Yeah, well, sometimes rules are proved by exceptions.
The original NES is actually incredibly, ridiculously easy to
