"The Internet of[...]"

Quite frequently I hear historians referring to something as "the Internet" of a previous age. This really annoys me. There was no Internet before the late 20th century, and referring to railroads as "the Internet of the mid-19th century" or to ancient Roman roads as "the Internet of the ancient world" does not do a damned thing to help the reader understand what things were like in those bygone eras. Which, supposedly, is the historians' job.

Lion Feuchtwanger's novel Jud Süß, first published in 1925, begins with a description of the roads in the German state of Wuerttemberg in the early 18th century:

"Ein Netz von Adern schnürten sich Straßen über das Land, sich querend, verzweigend, versiegend. Sie waren verwahrlost, voll von Steinen, Löchern, zerrissen, überwachsen, bodenloser Sumpf, wenn es regnete, dazu überall von Schlagbäumen unterbunden." ("Roads formed a network across the land, crossing, forking, petering out. They were unmaintained, full of stones and holes, ripped up, overgrown with weeds, bottomless swamps when it rained, but on the other hand controlled everywhere by toll booths." My translation.)

Feuchtwanger goes on to describe how these streets which were impossibly muddy whenever it rained were choked with dust whenever the sun shone. He describes the traffic on these roads, from the luxurious travel of the Prince of Wuerttemberg and the Prince-Bishop of Wuerzburg and the Venetian ambassador, and the King of Prussia and his entourage, who had visited the southern German courts in "six solid but somewhat shabby coaches," to the couriers of the powerful on fast, frequently-changed horses, to the coaches of various sorts of post which carried mail and people and various rates of speed, to a long train of Jews who had been expelled from an unspecified Imperial German city and were on their way to Frankfurt, and all sorts of other people in wagons and on foot, apprentices, students, wealthy Jewish merchants and poor Jewish tinkers, a former professor at a Bavarian university, disheveled and on foot, who had been dismissed for rebellious and heretical speech, and others still.

You know what Feuchtwanger does not do? He does not call these roads "the Internet of the early 18th century." Perhaps you'd object that this novel was published in 1925, and that there wasn't any Internet in 1925, and you'd have a very good point. However, Feuchtwanger also does not call the roads in Wuerttemberg "the telephone network of the early 18th century" or even "the telegraph network of the early 18th century." No, he describes them as what they were: roads in miserable condition, covered with toll booths, traveled by a variety of people in coaches wagons, on horseback and on foot, and not a telegraph station, telephone or wireless device in sight.

That's how you do it. That's how historians who are skilled and not lazy do it. You take the reader back into those bygone eras and let them sense how different things were than they are today. And instead of writing that the best available means of communication at the time were "the Internet of" that time, if they want to emphasize that other means of the time were even more primitive, they actually describe those other, more primitive means. It takes more work to write in this more descriptive way, but it also accomplishes a lot more.

"Time Team"

I've been binge-watching "Time Team" on YouTube, a British TV show which ran from 1994 to 2014. As with other British TV series, British people don't call it a series, but a programme. What we in the US refer to as a season of a TV show, the Brits call a series. So, series 1 of "Time Team" first aired in 1994, series 20 in 2013, and then in 2012 and 2014 several "Time Team" specials were the last of it.

Each episode of "Time Team" featured a team of archaeologists and associated professionals arriving at a site, usually in the UK, because previous digs in the area and/or local folklore and/or something else suggest it would be promising, and spending three days digging and analyzing what they dug up, whether it was Stone Age, Bronze Age, Iron Age, Roman, Saxon, Norman, Tudor or Miscellaneous.

"Time Team" has shown, explained, demonstrated, to millions of viewers all over the world, that showing up somewhere, digging for three days and then leaving again is a particularly stupid way of doing archaeology. It's not enough time. (I suppose Channel 4 turned down the programme title "Not Enough Time Team.") If an archaeological site is at all interesting, it will take years or decades of digging, or more, to find what is of interest which is buried there.

However, the archaeologists who appeared on "Time Team" are good at their jobs, so that the show's format may actually not do more harm to archaeology than it does good. After the three days are up, the "Time Team" team report their finding to other professionals not constrained by a three-day limit, and, one presumes, ordinary archaeology carries on from there.

What we Americans refer to as the host of a non-fictional TV show, the British call a presenter. "Time Team" was presented by Tony Robinson, a famous actor.

American audiences may recognize him from his years of portraying Baldrick, the lovable, stupid sidekick of the title character in the series "Blackadder," who was played by Rowan Atkinson, who is much more well-known as Mr Bean.

Over and over again, for twenty years on "Time Team," for hundreds of episodes, Tony Robinson, who either is lovable and stupid in real life as well, or pretended to be for two decades on a supposedly nonfictional TV show, got all worked up because he thought the archaeologists, historians and geophysics specialists were doing everything all wrong, only for the professionals to patiently explain to him on camera what it actually was they were doing and what they were finding, and why they were doing things the way they were and not how Tony thought they should have.

Either Tony actually never understood that he was working with pros, or the makers of "Time Team" thought it would be good for him to do the same schtick, over and over, for twenty years, and that viewers wouldn't catch or begin to find it repetitive.

There's no denying that Robinson has a certain charm: although middle-aged, he's always running around excitedly and waving his arms and shouting in a wide-eyed childlike manner, seemingly quite fascinated by what's going on, even if he never learned enough about it to change his standard, "Oh, we've only got [insert a portion of three days] left, and for the life of me I can't understand why they're still digging over there," and then the pros patiently explain it all to him.

Mick Aston usually heads the dig, and assumes the major part of the burden of explaining things to Tony, and therefore also to the viewers.

The show's archaeologists are all genuine successful archaeologists with prestigious positions apart from the show. However, the accent of one of them, Phil Harding, is really too much. Harding's accent is much, much more annoying that Tony Robinson's real or pretended buffoonery. It's almost annoying enough to make me stop binge-watching this otherwise-fascinating silly series. I am not the only one who has asked whether that accent is fake. I can picture actual Northerners (of which Harding is not one) asking, referring to Phil Harding's accent, "Oy, atsa bit much, doncha fink, oy? E zounds like a particularly bad bit player in a very annoying 1940's pirate movie, oy?" Harding's appearance offends me as well. Aston has very long hair, and it just makes him look mildly eccentric in the good British academic eccentric tradition, but long hair makes Phil Harding look even more hideous than he already would, which would have been much more than plenty.

And the accent, that God-damned accent -- it seems to me that it fades a little bit when Harding is intensely discussing archaeological matters, which Harding appears to do with intelligence, skill and deep knowledge. As a fake accent would tend to fade when its owner was thinking hard.

The show's other regularly-appearing specialists include archaeologists Carenza Lewis and Francis Pryor, archaeological geophysicist John Gator and archivist Robin Bush. I have no particular problem with any of them.

Why do People Dislike Elon Musk?

Many people have commented about how Elon Musk denounced requirements for businesses to shut down because of the coronavirus, and how he blatantly violated those requirements, keeping his Tesla plant in Fremont, California open and churning out cars. Disappointingly few people have been pointing out why Musk did this: his pay from Tesla, Inc comes in the form of bonuses which are tied to several factors, and one of those factors is the number of vehicles Tesla makes. Once again this year, Musk will get a bonus worth several billion dollars, and one reason is because Tesla kept churning out those cars.

Did the Tesla employees on the assembly lines also get bonuses for hitting production goals? No. But I gather that they do get attaboy emails from Musk, telling them what a good job they're doing, and how they're saving the world.

What do they get when they talk about improving safety conditions, or about unions? They get fired.

Now, when people like me complain about how Musk mistreats his employees, or when we repeats those awfully persistent rumours that the Tesla assembly lines don't look nearly as shiny as clean as in the photos which Tesla allows to go public,

or how Musk milks the company for money, or lies to the public about how much his cars cost or about the terms he offered to other companies to join in with Tesla's Supercharger network, or discourages people from fixing their own Teslas although Tesla service is notoriously slow and expensive, or about how Musk has nothing but verbal abuse and downright slander for any company which hints that it might begin to compete with Tesla for a share of the EV market, or about how he won a lawsuit to allow him to call himself a founder of Tesla even though he's not, or about how he calls someone who rescued a group of boys from dying in a cave a pedophile, or about how the real Nikola Tesla was a brilliant man who was shabbily treated by the billionaire businessman Thomas Edison, who constantly took credit for his employees' ideas and hard work while ruthlessly eliminating competing corporations, or other complaints about how Musk is a thieving, fraudulent, cruel monster ripping off those who adore him, or what have you, we often hear the response that Tesla is revolutionizing the auto industry, and that it wouldn't be a success without Musk. But are either of those answers true?

We hear from Musk's ardent disciples -- this is a cult we're talking about -- that Tesla wouldn't exist today if Musk hadn't rescued it with money from his own pocket. They seem to believe that Musk quite selflessly offered all of the money he had in order to keep Tesla going.

No. Musk invested $30 million dollars in Tesla in 2004. This was not all of the money Musk had at the time: he had recently sold his share in PayPal for over a billion dollars.

That's right: although Musk didn't found Tesla, he did co-found PayPal. Have you heard lots of comments about how PayPal is a wonderful company which is making the world a better, safer, fairer, cleaner, more righteous place? Yeah, neither have I. In fact I've never heard a single comment remotely like that. But the next company Musk is involved with, suddenly, boom, you hear all of that all of the time, and you hear that it's all because of Musk.

So, Musk invested $30 million in Tesla in 2004, and now he's being paid several billion dollars every year. That's a pretty good return on investment -- it's pretty good for Musk, I mean. I'm not sure it's good for anyone else.

Would Tesla have gone under if not for that $30 million from Musk? It's hard for me to imagine that they would have. They raised hundreds of millions of dollars from other sources around the time they Musk put in his $30 million.

And now Tesla is making cars in China, home of those sweatshops which manufacture iPhones and Nikes and other products from companies which claim to be progressive. What's progressive about sweatshops? Why aren't more people asking what working conditions are like for Tesla employees in China?

What you hear more often than any other answer, when people like me disrespect Elon Musk, is that we're all jealous cause he's so cool and so successful and so brilliant.

Yeah. That must be it.

Dream Log: Girlfriend Trouble

In last night's dream there was no pandemic. The time was 2020, but I was 35 years younger (early 20's.)

I dreamed I was an undergraduate at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, as I was in the 1980's. I haven't been to Knoxville since 1992. I dreamed a university which looked much different than the one I attended: much more shiny and imposing-looking. Many more huge exterior glass walls on campus buildings.

I have no idea how much my dream university resembled the actual UT. But I have seen some recent photos and I know that the place has changed a lot.

I was hanging out with a fellow student I dated briefly in 1985, and two of her women friends. In the dream, we had just met. We were sitting on couches inside the big glass wall of a campus building. Then she and I kissed for the first time, and I was very happy about that. In real life, I really liked being her boyfriend and would've liked to continue it longer. It was she who dumped me. She was a little bit on the heavy side, but very cute. For purposes of reducing confusion, let's call her Kate.

Then, in the dream, one of her friends -- let's call her Amy -- was suddenly all over me, hugging me, kissing me, rubbing my shoulders and my scalp, climbing all over me like a gymnast on an apparatus. Amy was lean and athletic and very pretty, and although I felt guilty about feeling this way, I was suddenly much more attracted to her than to Kate. I hadn't noticed Amy much at all before she jumped on me.

I didn't know what to do. I felt like I owed it to Kate to continue with her, but I wanted much more to be with Amy. And I felt that it would be dishonest to stay with Kate if that was not what I really wanted.

And, I had to remind myself, I had just met these women, and I had absolutely no idea what they wanted, so that, for example, by thinking that I owed something to Kate, I was assuming something about her intentions.

The third woman never touched me and plays no further role in this dream.

Next, the four of us were separated, and I was running around, looking for -- Amy, although I felt guilty about that, although I had met both Kate and Amy only minutes before. I caught up to Amy on a landing on a huge, multi-story, escalator. On the other side of another huge glass wall students were sitting at rows of PC's. (Is that an unrealistic detail? Would university students today all use their own laptops and/or other mobile devices? Would the poorer students use PC's provided by the university? Would it vary from university to university? I don't know.)

Amy jumped on me again and we made out, not caring who was looking. The pleasure, at least for me, was incredible. I wanted to talk about what was happening, and I was getting more and more worried that Amy was going to be done with me soon -- maybe as soon as a few minutes -- and that this would never happen again. Or that she would just make out with me, or with anybody else, if and when she chose, and would feel no need to commit to me. I started to get pessimistic about it, and to feel as if I had already been dumped, while we were still making out. I thought: what could the odds possibly be that Amy was as emotionally invested in this as I was? What could the odds possibly be that I was as impressive sensually as she was to me? Then I woke up.

Martianus Capella

Martianus Mennius Felix Capella, often referred to simply as Martianus, wrote, in the early 5th century, the most popular Latin guide to the liberal arts during the early Medieval period, De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii (On the Marriage of Philology and Mercury), a work of combined prose and verse.

The first two books relate the tale of the god Mercury taking Philology as his bride. Then follow seven books, each narrated by a servant given to Philology (from the Greek; literally, "love for the word," in Martianus' time meaning education or scholastic pursuits generally, and in our time usually referring to the study of ancient Greek and Latin) as a wedding gift by Mercury, and each incorporating one of the liberal arts. And by the way, take a look at the seven liberal arts as defined by Martianus and consider how the meaning of the phrase "liberal arts" has changed: for Martianus, and for Western education in general for a very, very long time, the seven liberal arts were grammar, dialectic, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astronomy and harmony. In Martianus' book, much of what is discussed under the heading of geometry is what we would call geography, which may not be so strange when one considers that the literal meaning of the geometry, from the Greek, is "measuring the world."

Like Apuleius, the 2nd-century author of various works including the widely-read and much-loved novel referred to as either the Metamorphoses (not to be confused with Ovid's poem of the same name) or The Golden Ass in which the narrator spends much of the book trapped in the body of a donkey, Martinaus was a native of the town of Madaura, in the Roman province of Africa and in present-day Algeria. Martinus clearly imitates Apuleius' writing style, which can be a good or a very bad thing, depending upon one's opinion of Apuleius. Opinions of Apuleius diverge to a great extent. Some modern critics have verbally abused Martianus for imitating Apuleius all too well, or for reproducing Apuleius' worst excesses while failing to approach his strong points. Others, apparently less disturbed by drastic departures from conventional Classic Latin style, have professed to have been entertained by Martianus.

Very little is known about Martianus' life, other than that he was a lawyer, and apparently did not make much money at it.

However, from his own time until the Aristotelian revolution in education in the 13th century, Martianus' book seems to have been very highly thought of. John Scotus Erigena was among those who wrote commentaries on it. Notker translated the first two books into German in the early 11th century. Martianus was used as the model for school curricula all over Latin Europe. At the present time, over 250 manuscripts of Martianus are known, including 11 from the 9th century and a 12th manuscript from the 10th century, a very impressive number of such early manuscripts. However, a note reproduced in many manuscripts, dated to the year 534, indicated that already at that early date a certain Securus Melior Felix, who intended to make an edition of Martianus, found the existing manuscripts to be hopelessly full of errors, a complaint which, unfortunately, seems to be borne out by the state of the surviving manuscripts today. Two 20th-century Teubner editions, by A Dick (1925) and James Willis (1983) struggle admirably with the difficulties of the text.

Dream Log: A Good Time in NYC

In last night's dream, NYC was like NYC except that there was no pandemic, and everyone my brother and I ran into tended to be both very bright and very friendly. There are of course many very bright, very friendly people in the real NYC, but most of the people there are pretty much like most of the people everywhere.

My brother and I were visiting New York for some reason.

In downtown Manhattan we ran into a man who was traveling by electric skateboard. I told him I was interested in electric vehicles, and that I had read about electric skateboards and seen videos of them, but this was the first I had seen close-up. The man responded by talking about a minor-league baseball team based across the river in Brooklyn. (When I woke up I assumed that there were currently no minor-league teams in the real NYC, but I researched it, and there are at least 2, and at least 1 in Brooklyn.)

The man's mention of the Brooklyn baseball team carried my brother and me to Brooklyn, where we stood on the sidewalk outside the stadium where a game was being played, and a ball came over the stadium wall and rolled past us and past the glass patio door of an apartment. Inside the apartment, a baby pressed up against the glass of the patio door, reaching out its hands to try to catch the baseball rolling past. My brother ran and got the ball and waved with it through the patio door, offering to the baby's mother to give it to the baby. The mother invited us into the apartment, which was full of children and dogs. One of the dogs tried to eat the baseball. I managed to get the ball out of the dog's mouth, and mentioned to the mother that maybe the dog was hungry. The mother answered that she couldn't see why, and gestured to a dog dish which was full of slices of turkey which looked and smelled plenty good enough for people to eat.

When I saw the turkey, suddenly my brother and I were out on the sidewalk in downtown Brooklyn. A young man was handing out flyers, and something in the expression on his face made me think that maybe the thing for which he was handing out flyers was actually very good. They were flyers for the opening of a soul-food restaurant. The young man smiled and nodded his head to one side. I took a flyer, followed the direction of the man's nod, and soon my brother and I had found the restaurant.

My brother and I weren't the only white people in the place, but all of the staff and most of the customers I could see were black. I returned the warm smile of the woman behind the counter, nodded at my brother and said, "This is my brother. He's afraid of black people. I thought this could be an opportunity for him to learn and grow." The woman laughed, my brother scowled. I asked if there was something on the menu which would be good for eating while walking, and the woman suggested an appetizer which cost $6. It smelled like liver and looked like a brown pile of assorted fried items. I took a plastic spoonful, and it was marvelously delicious. I went back to the counter and asked for a second plastic spoon so that my brother could have a taste. My brother took a bite and agreed that it was amazing. We went back and ordered more food to go. I asked the lady behind the counter, who appeared to be the head chef if not also the owner of the place, what exactly was in these appetizers. "Chicken livers and a lot of other stuff," she answered. I told her I had already assumed that much, and asked if she could be more specific, but clearly, this was a top-secret-recipe type situation. I got 6 barbecued chicken thighs to go. My plan was to put them in the fridge and see what they tasted like as cold leftovers. I was convinced that they were going to be tremendously good that way.

And then I woke up.

Weight Training with Maximum Effect

People have been lifting weights, both for exercise and as a competitive sport, for thousands of years.

Back in the 1970's, weightlifting suddenly became much more popular with the widespread adoption of Nautilus machines and similar devices.

A Nautilus machine only allows the weight to move up and down in a straight line. This makes it much easier to lift the weight, since all of a person's strength can be concentrated on making the weight move up, with no effort needed to stabilize it.

The point of competitive weightlifting is to see how much weight you can lift under certain conditions. The point of weight training is to strengthen your muscles. The conditions of the lifting can and should be adapted to that end. For a while, some people who lifted a certain weight on a Nautilus machine assumed that they were able to lift the same amount with free weights. Eventually, however, people noticed that someone who bench pressed 200 lbs on a Nautilus could not necessarily bench-press anywhere near 200 lbs with free weights. People began to appreciate how much strength was necessary to hold the weight steady, in addition to the strength required to lift it. And so many people went back from Nautilus machines to free weights, because the point of it all, as they saw it, was not to see how much weight they could lift, but to make their muscles as strong as possible. And this would be done, they understood, by doing exercise which was more difficult, not easier.

At some point, I do not know whether it was before or after the advent of the Nautilus machine, some people noticed that objects such as heavy balls, kegs, stones, sandbags and so forth, can give a more effective workout, pound for pound, than conventional free weights, because they are still more difficult to lift because they have no handles.

(Would it make the workout even more effective if the objects to be lifted were made deliberately slippery? Hmm. I'm going to think seriously about that question and get back to you about it.)

Some people, on the other hand, seem to completely miss this point, because they manufacture and exercise with things such as sandbags with handles, or medicine balls which are partly hollowed out to make room for handles.

Many people who work out with sandbags which have handles on them, and with Nautilus machines, are in far, far better physical condition than I. Still, I believe I have noticed a very basic and important principle which they have not noticed. And I'm far from the only one who believes this.

I got a 45-pound slam ball, a medicine ball designed not to bounce, and a 100-pound slam ball, and for quite a while I wondered why I found so few medicine balls heavier than 100 pounds. I think I may recently have found the answer: people use sandbags for heavier weights. A lot of people. I've found all sorts of sandbags designed to hold as much as 200, or 300, or 400 or more pounds of sand, seen all sorts of videos of people working out with sandbags of all of those weights.

I ordered a 400-pound sandbag from Amazon. This does not mean that Amazon will ship me something weighing 400 pounds. They will ship me a bag designed to hold up to 400 pounds of sand and be slung around and dropped and thrown without leaking any sand. Obtaining the sand and putting it into the bag will be my responsibility. (Home Depot seems to be the place to get the sand.)

Actually, what I'll be getting from Amazon is 2 bags, one inside the other. The inner bag holds the sand, the outer bag holds the inner bag, and both bags have multiple zippers and velcro flaps, and sand leakage doesn't seem to be a big problem. I hope not.

This also does not mean that I think I will be able to lift a 400-pound sandbag right away. Maybe I can, maybe I can't. However, I definitely can put 25 pounds of sand into a 400-pound bag, and I definitely can't put 400 pounds of sand into a 25-pound bag. I figured getting a 400-pound bag was more sensible that getting a 25-pound bag, and then a 50-pound bag a little later, and then a 100-pound bag a little later than that and so forth.

And I also want to see whether I can lift a 400-pound sandbag with no handles. I don't think I could lift one up over my head right now, but it would be really interesting to see whether I could lift it up off of the ground.

Coal Power in the UK

The UK was the first nation to burn coal on a large scale, in the 18th century; and in 1882 it was the first to generate electricity with coal.

In 2015, the Government -- that's their equivalent of what we Americans would call the Presidential administration -- announced that coal-powered generation of electricity would cease in the UK by 2025. They may accomplish that ahead of schedule: there were 14 remaining coal-fired power station in the UK at the time of the 2015 announcement. Right now, 4 are left in operation. In April 2017, the UK went for 24 hours period without generating any electricity from coal. In May 2019 they for a week week without coal power.[8]. In 2020 so far they went for one continuous period of over a month without any electricity generated by coal.

In 2014, 30% of the UK's electricity was generated with coal. In 2019 it was 2%.

By comparison, coal accounted for 39% of the country's electricity produced by utilities in 2014, 33% in 2015, 30.4% in 2016, 30.0% in 2017, 27.4% in 2018, and 23.5% in 2019. In 1990, the US had 4 times as much wind energy, and 50 times as much solar energy as any other single nation. Now China is ahead of us in both categories and other countries, most certainly including the UK, are gaining on us very fast. Many countries are going through developments very similar to those in the UK. Not the US, though. And especially not when Republicans control the White House and Congress.

My fellow Murrkins: learn what's going on in other countries. Ask our leaders why the US can't out-do them. And don't take any wooden nickles.

Wearing More Than One Watch at a Time

The are records of wrist watches having been made as long ago as the late 18th century, and, more likely than not, at some point early in their existence, some people began wearing more than one wristwatch at a time, for fashion reasons or other reasons.

However, the earliest instance of this I have been able to find (keep in mind, I haven't been looking for very long yet) is General Norman Schwarzkopf wearing a watch on either wrist beginning in 1990, at the start of the first Gulf War. Schwarzkopf had one watch set to Baghdad time, the other to Washington, DC time. Since then, wearing two (or more) watches at once has been known in some circles as "doing the Schwarzkopf." Buzz Aldrin, Fidel Castro and Ted Cruz have all been seen doing the Schwarzkopf. I have not yet been able to find any records of Schwarzkopf having asked any of them to stop.

I have done a little bit of searching in online discussion groups devoted to watches where people have asked whether it's okay to wear more than one watch at a time, or whether people will think it looks stupid or what have you. The responses I've seen so far have been overwhelmingly positive, saying, yeah, you be you, wear as many as you want to. Keep in mind, however, that some of the participants in such discussion groups are watch dealers, and that some watch dealers might figure that the more watches someone wears at one time, the more watches they are likely to purchase, and so, they might sometimes encourage wearing more than one watch at a time even if they think it looks really, really stupid.

One comment in one of these discussions said that, although he personally found nothing at all wrong with it, for every one person encouraging you to wear as many watches as you want to, there might be as many as ten judgemental jerks who would question not only your fashion sense, but also your personal and professional competence, if they spotted you wearing more than one watch at a time. My reaction to that is that it seems that the person making the comment might have a bad job where he is surrounded by judgemental creeps, and might be much happier if he made a drastic change to, for instance, a situation where he could wear a whole bunch of watches at once and the people around him would think it was great. One thing I'm absolutely sure about is that the reaction you will get by wearing more than one watch at once will vary greatly according to the kind of people with whom you surround yourself.

In a similar vein: in the course of researching this post, I came across an online article discussing weather a man should wear a watch at all. The author said yes, and he said yes for reasons having to do with peer pressure (also known as fashion) -- he asserted, for example, that nothing looks more desperate than a man fumbling for his cell phone in order to check the time.

It all depends on your point of view: to me, few things seem more desperate and insecure than someone who would worry about others judging him because he used his cell phone to check the time.

I'm so glad that, back in the 1980's, I came across that interview with Cormac McCarthy in which he declared that you have cleared one of the major hurdles in life when you have ceased to worry about what other people think of you. That's solid-gold advice.

Regular readers of this blog know that my position is that the only sensible reason to wear a watch in our present age is because you want to, not because you want to impress anyone else but because you like the watch in question.

Or the watches in question. Maybe you've gotten a new watch recently and you've been wearing the new one, but you starting missing wearing the one you wore previously, so now you wear them both. I say: good for you! Wear a watch on either wrist if you want to. Wear two watches on each wrist if you want to. I am decidedly, emphatically, firmly in the You Be You camp, and I have never sold a watch, and I also have no plans to do so.

I don't follow fashion closely. It was not until I started researching this post -- I started doing that yesterday -- that I discovered that some people who write about ladies' fashion for a living have encouraged ladies to wear more than one watch on a wrist since the early 2010's.

One of the most distinguished writers about men's watches recently wrote a column which began with the assertion that smartwatches really are watches. It wouldn't have occurred to me to argue otherwise, but apparently it has occurred to some people who interact with this particular writer. In any case, it seems to me that the rest of this particular column undercut the point with which it began, because it was all about wearing a conventional watch on one wrist and a smartwatch on the other -- as if there actually were a crucial difference.

My position would be, wear a mechanical watch (or two or three) on each wrist, and carry a few pocket watches in your pockets -- mechanical pockets watches, of course! -- and do the smart watch stuff on your phone. But it's not as if huge crowds of people have been clamoring for my opinion about this sort of thing. Well, maybe after I publish this post.

Maybe you have far, far more interesting things on your mind than watches and are a far wiser person than I.

I think the Trainman in The Marix Revolutions wore about 10 watches on each wrist. But does anybody really know how many it was?