This morning, as I shaved, bleary and stuffed up from hay fever in a hotel somewhere in America, I found myself gazing in admiration at my razor, an inexpensive plastic, two-bladed device that comes 10 to a bag and costs about 30 cents. I cannot remember the last time I cut myself shaving. It's been many years. And yet sometimes I shave in a hurry, sometimes in a stupor, often enough in dim light. Razors are so well designed and well made now that you'd have to try to cut yourself.

That amounts to a kind of revolution in this little arena of life.

When I was an adolescent, my father initiated me into the mysteries of his faux ivory double-bladed razor, whose metal top opened like the cargo doors on the space shuttle. In spite of his ministrations and grim warnings, I spent the next years going to school with tiny bits of toilet paper stemming the flow of blood from my plethora of facial and neck wounds. That was then. Young people have it so easy nowadays!

Remember when vanity mirrors at home and in hotel rooms, and indeed in airport restrooms (in that more innocent age), had razor blade disposal chutes, where spent blades went and never returned until the demolition of the house?

It's hard to imagine that there can ever again be any real improvements in men's razors. Because consumer capitalism depends on novelty, all the razor companies introduce new and improved basic razors every year. One lays down a micro thin layer of lotion just in front of the blade, another introduces the rare third or fourth blade ("for your shaving comfort and confidence with the opposite sex").

My point is that, until we can master in-utero gene splicing to eliminate the necessity of beards altogether, we have reached the endgame of the razor revolution. For all of the hype, I know of no electric razor that provides as close and smooth a shave as a 30-cent Schick or Bic.

The question I found myself asking, in my dawn taxi ride to the airport this morning, is, what other devices have essentially reached their final form, beyond which all improvements are essentially about pigmentation, packaging and decals?

I can think of only two. One is the nail clipper. The other is the corkscrew.

I first became fascinated by the technology of the nail clipper after reading an essay about it by the novelist and miniaturist Nicholson Baker, who pointed out that since a man named Chapel Carter invented the device (1896), all attempts to improve upon the basic design have failed to win converts. It's a perfect tool that does one thing perfectly (though I confess to having used it corruptly as a wire clipper). Because I travel a lot, I wind up buying such things as shampoo, nail clippers, deodorant, shirts and copies of Stephen Ambrose's "Undaunted Courage" with some regularity. When I moved from Reno to Bismarck, my business partner, Janie, who helped me pack and move, said, a little acerbically, "Just how many nail clippers does one human being need?" Quoting King Lear, I replied, "Oh Reasons not the need!" Still, don't you sometimes wonder what humanity did before the invention of the nail clipper?

My grandfather was a tough German farmer, who worked among cattle and combines and corn cribs all of his life. His toenails were so thick and leathery that no mere nail clipper could do the trick. We used to watch in a kind of nauseated fascination as he cut his toenails off with his pocket knife (at the kitchen table). Even those industrial strength, horse-tested toenail clippers routinely burst apart when he attempted to apply them to the linoleum on his feet.

The traditional corkscrew does not have quite so sure a monopoly on the marketplace as does the nail clipper. We've all seen and tried those units that send slender metal feelers down on either side of the cork, others that combine the best of the corkscrew and the best of the garlic press. The wealthy and the pretentious, oenophiles, can buy a $150 item that eviscerates the cork effortlessly. Wine experts increasingly say that corks are unnecessary and that in a purely rational world we'd move to screwtop bottles. But I'm someone it doesn't really feel like wine without that short struggle with the cork, and the lower tech the corkscrew, the better, as far as I'm concerned. Wine is liquid art, encapsulated, for me, in the "Rubaiyat" of Omar Khayyam:

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,

A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and thou.

When we were growing up, knowing my father was the "man who had everything," I used to give him at holidays such worthless gimmicky items as the "Hot Dogger," electric tie racks, talking piggy banks, the Ronco "splatter screen" and devices by which you could use advanced calculus to determine how far your ball was from the cup. All those gifts have taken their place at the Dickinson landfill, except the Ginsu knives, which - astonishingly - not only still exist in my mother's knife drawer, but still, 40 years later, will not only cut through a car chassis but thereafter slice a perfect tomato. For years I have given Ginsu knives as my signature wedding gift, and though nobody has ever thanked me or repressed a fair dollop of peevishness, I know that time is on my side and the moment will come, sometime in the next century, when they write to apologize for doubting the enduring efficacy of the finest gift they ever received and the only one they still routinely use on flooring projects and (the same day) slicing cucumbers.

The devices I've listed so far represent permanent contributions to human happiness, but what about the innovations that are changing so fast we cannot keep up?

In my garage, I have a box full of 5½-inch floppies, filled with who knows what (all once vitally important). I haven't thrown them out because, well, I don't throw much away, and because I sometimes think, maybe I'll remember some document I want or need, and then I can find the disk and take it to a specialty shop where it will be magically transferred into a format I can read on whatever computer I happen then to be using. Of course, this is perfectly absurd since I rarely ever bothered to label the disks, and they are probably too gritty with dust to be of any use to anyone.

There also are four or five old computers, each of which is chock full of stuff that I ought to have culled and preserved and transferred, but never have. They sit there, collecting dust,waiting for the moment when I load them up and take them to the dump.

Things we used to take for granted have undergone unbelievable technological revolutions in recent years. Which of you thinks you have the cell phone you will be using in 2015? Whenever I buy a DVD player or a digital camera or an MP3 player, no matter which one I choose, I feel a terrible sinking feeling, because I know that I am buying Beta Max and that within years, or even months, I am going to have to upgrade or buy some impossibly expensive conversion equipment to avoid being left in the ash heap of history. Since the digital revolution began, I have taken at least 25,000 photographs and every one of them, except for the handful I have actually printed, is in dire danger of becoming inaccessible.

I had a meeting with Librarian of Congress James Billington in February about the possibility of digitizing the complete Roosevelt collection in the Library of Congress. To my initial but not prolonged astonishment, Billington said, "Microfilm is looking better and better. It holds up over very long periods of time, and it doesn't require constant updating. The digitization of knowledge means that everything is going to have to be transferred for the rest of time as newer and more versatile storage devices become available. It's a miracle - and for keepers of the great tradition, a nightmare too."

What am I, Andy Rooney?

(Clay Jenkinson is the Theodore Roosevelt scholar-in-residence at Dickinson State Univesity. He lives in Bismarck. Contact Jenkinson at Jeffysage@;aol.com.)