Skip to main content

An hour in time


I might have pontificated on the subject of what America witnessed yet again but that was in the past.  The subject of Daylight Saving Time.  What a timely topic.

Among the fairy tales man invented like Marriage, Religion, Money, Taxes there is one that is omnipresent and seriously unavoidable and that is Time.

The other fantasies can be avoided religiously if one chooses to but no sir not Time.  It passes without you even knowing it and if you wanted to get something or from somewhere to somewhere you need it.  Or at least a vague idea of it.

I just saw a movie about three US Navy sailors among hundreds flying to attack Japan in WWII who were thought to be lost at sea when their plane goes down in the Pacific.  Turned out after 45 days at open sea these three made it back to a Polynesian island on a raft.  They too counted time with a pencil and tally marks scribed on a life vest they saved.  Their very existence was at stake and yet they found time to mark time.

See time is important.  We tell that to ourselves and our children.  Don't waste your time.  Time is precious and la la la la.   But when you think of the ways it is represented and mangled to suit modern life your head hurts.  There is Zulu time.  Military Time. Greenwich Mean Time.  Standard Time. Daylight Saving Time. 

Then there are the time zones.  Chinese decided long back that they are going to stay away from all that nonsense and just labeled their whole country as a single time zone nation.  Same for India.

We have egg timers, stop clocks, nuclear clocks, clock in Times Square, even Apple which hit a trillion dollar market cap decided it can mark time and make money doing it so they came up with what else - a smart watch - to keep smart time.

To me this is all time pass.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

New England is gleaming in the fall

 This autumn the weather gods cooperated as we took a family trip in the northeast to see six states that qualify or makeup what is known colloquially in America as New England. Mass, Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Connecticut and Rhode Island (tiniest state in the union). The outing helped tally up the states we either lived in, visited or have worked in to 47. Guess which three have eluded this intrepid traveling family. Any rate the drive was all in about 1,800 miles and included some memorable geographic wonders or points of interest.  Easternmost part of state of Massachusetts being one.  Furthest drivable road east in Mass being another. Visit to all Ivy League schools (term harkens to a collegiate athletics conference and generally regarded as elite academic institutes of some repute worldwide) is another random bucket list item of which this trip afforded the chance to knock two more of the list.  Dartmouth in Hanover, NH and Brown (and its sister institute the RISD  - school f

Searching for a lavish 'fill in the blank with other adjectives and gender' in bed

 Many of the readers of this blog have experienced this. Strange sounding messages popping up in your text or WA or emails all day long from some exotic sounding locale with an out of this world individual looking for love, sex, money or other paraphernalia to get a high. I mean granted that electronic spamming is a low cost enterprise and all but the sheer volumes and the variety in these exhortations is beyond imagination. Having a desire to engage you in some sort of sexual payola or invest in some arcane crypto scheme must be a profound algorithm that someone from Oklahoma to Odessa is cranking on through the night and watching one in a few million fall for. Otherwise this nonsense would not exist I suspect. It would be funny to watch the lifecycle of some such persona that creates said content and that of a prospect for this invite becoming an unwilling or willing participant. Then that whole thing could go on some social channel and earn likes and subscriptions for someone else a

Lakeside frivolities

 We moved to the Charlotte area not knowing where exactly our new home would be. Turns out it was by a popular lake formed by the damming of the Catawba river which flows north to south in the Carolinas. Local electricity generation utility built a series of dams along the waterway for hydro and couple nuclear plants as well to supply the state grid.  The lake our house butts into is Lake Wylie. While tract home build has picked up in the Carolinas the developer often carves out parcels that they can get their hands on leaving behind privately owned lots that the individual owner may not want to sell. Our house is part of a subdivision but backs into actual lake front yardage that has always been part of legacy family owned properties who chose to build a cabin or getaway and did not sell to a corporation wanting to build in the hundreds. As such we can see the water through the year but it does not afford actual water access.  That privilege is to our neighbors who still maintain thei