Extreme Watches

The adjective "extreme" makes me smile. It reminds me of the idiots in Harold and Kumar go to White Castle who seemed to have only two adjectives in their working vocabulary: "so extreme" and "so not extreme." When they inflicted some torment on the undeserving Harold and Kumar they would laugh and say, "That was so extreme!" And when Harold and Kumar got a little well-justified revenge, they indignantly exclaimed,"This is so not extreme!"

Still, I don't know how describe these watches, as a group, other than to call them extreme.

I've already blogged about 2 of these watches, the Hublot MP-05, which runs for 50 days on one wind-up and is made to resemble a Ferrari engine,

and the Urwerk Atomic Master Clock or AMC,

which I'm sure is a very nice watch to begin with, accurate, I would guess, to well within a second or two per 24 hours, but which comes with a suitcase-sized atomic clock which sets it to a far, far greater degree of accuracy.

Some hand-wind Swiss watches with a power reserve of a mere 2 or 3 days require some muscle power and determination to wind them. I had wondered just how difficult it was to wind up the 50-day Hublot -- hand-wind only, no automatic winding -- until I found out recently that "hand wind' is not an entirely accurate term to describe this watch, because it comes with an electric implement which resembles a small power drill. The part corresponding to the drill bit fits into a whole like the one which a 19th-century watch had, into which a key was fitted which one turned to wind the watch. In the case of the 50-day Hublot, one pulls the trigger on the drill-like machine, and it winds the watch. I wonder whether Hublot also offers a manual option for macho nut cases with things to prove, who are determined to wind it the hard way. And I wonder just exactly how hard that hard way would be and how well I would do it, because clearly, I have issues.

Is it just me, or does the suitcase atomic clock for the Urwerk AMC look exactly like a suitcase nuclear bomb in every movie which has one? Did Urwerk do that on purpose, the sly devils? Speaking of needing to prove things, do jet-setting Urwerk customers actually carry the suitcase atomic clock everywhere they go,  getting wrestled to the ground and interrogated in airports and downtowns all over the world until the police and security figure out that that it's an atomic CLOCK and not an atomic BOMB? 

And when the cops and security personnel figure out what the suitcase-sized thing is, do they laugh and high-five the extreme-watch owner, or are they quite annoyed? Or is it a mix of both?

After the last Formula 1 season, Hublot was replaced as Ferrari's official watch partner by Richard Mille. Check out one of Richard's watches:

If you said: Wowzer. Me likey! I'm surprised that Ferrari likes something so extreme -- that's exactly what I said. Word for word.

But wait! There's more! There's something out there which is too out there for me! I admire what this guy is doing, but frankly, I don't want it on my wrist because it would give me motion sickness. Behold, Crazy Hours by Franck Muller:

See where the 1 is on the dial? See how you have to skip the 6, 11, 4 and 9 to get from the 1 to the 2? And then how you have to skip the 7, 12, 5, 10 to get from the 2 to the 3? You getting dizzy and nauseous yet? The minute and second hands go around and around on this watch just like on a normal watch, but the hour hand skips. That's too much for me, I'm out!

There are a lot of watch snobs who hate Hublot, and who hate Richard Mille even more. But they don't hate Urwerk, maybe because of who the ancestors of the creators of Urwerk were. I don't know how they feel about Franck Muller.

I also don't know how I would like any of these brands if I saw them close up, picked them up and felt them in my hands and put them on my wrist. So far I've only seen photos and video, and by now I know that photos and video just aren't the same as being there. 

A lot of you may have seen video of Urwerk without realizing it: Tony Stark, Robert Downey Jr as Iron Man, wore an Urwerk in Spiderman: Homecoming. Not the AMC shown above. The UR-110.

SKATEBOARD PUNKS TRAUMATIZED ME!

Skateboard punks traumatized me. For example, on the campus of the Ohio State University. This probably would've been in the 20th century. Right in the middle of the campus, about as busy as Columbus pedestrian traffic got, there's a museum and performing-arts center designed by Philip Eisenman. Parts of the exterior happen to be great for skateboarding. I don't know if they've changed anything in the meantime, but back then, they hadn't decided whether the space should belong to pedestrians or to skateboarders, so you had lots of both.

 

I don't know whether the skateboarders were intentionally terrorizing... me. I was going to write, "[...]terrorizing pedestrians," but to be honest, I don't know whether anyone else was terrorized. So anyway, I felt as if the skateboarders were invading my personal space and making me get out of their way, and making no effort whatsoever to get out of my way. Even at the time, I wasn't sure whether there was any danger, or any reason for me or any of the other pedestrians to have to dodge them. I don't recall hearing about any skateboarder-pedestrian accidents, or any skateboarder-bicyclist accidents. 

But it FELT as if they were being very rude and as if people had to dodge them, while they made zero effort not to collide with people. And that made me angry. And so I tried to collide with them, I tried to step into their paths. None of them ever hit me. 

So then there was this other guy. I have no idea whether he was a skateboarder or not. He was on the bike path. Or, more precisely, IN the bike path. 

There was a bike path which went from south and east of the OSU campus to north of it as far as Worthington, and probably farther. And often, when I rode on the path, I was grumpy, because 1) I'm grumpy, 2) various large dogs seem to have been trained to attack bicyclists, and 3) there were a lot of people who seemed not to care whether they were in bicyclists' way: walking in big groups, cycling really slow and veering unpredictably from one side of the path to the other, etc. 

So here was this guy, on the path as it ran through the campus and past an area which was divided up into several soccer practice fields. This guy was sitting IN the path, sketching in a pad.

And I mumbled something as I biked around him. 

And then he screamed at me. Something about how he was just doing what he had to do.

Maybe I was twenty yards past him at that point. I laid my bike down on the ground and turned around and faced him. He screamed some more, something like that I should come on, I was twice his size. 

As if he assumed that I intended to physically fight him. No, that was not the case. I had stopped because I was considering talking to him, telling him I got stressed from having to dodge people on the path, and how, at least as it seemed to me, there was plenty of round NEAR the path where he could have been sitting, without making cyclists have to dodge him. 

But I ended up not saying anything. Instead I picked up  my bike and rode away. I suspected that he might have been crazy, or on angel dust or something, and that an attempt at conversation might have been useless. 

I never had any intention of pummeling the guy. And I was upset to begin with because it seemed to me that he was making it unnecessarily difficult for me not to accidentally hit him.

So it seems to me that either I get upset a lot when I shouldn't, or that many other people are astonishingly rude. Or perhaps both.

The World of Watches

 As my brother said to me,

"Some people would tell you watches are anachronisms."

Those people would be entirely correct. As more and more watch enthusiasts are admitting to themselves, the only rational reason to have a watch is because you enjoy having it. And as if that weren't already enough, the watches which 999 out of 1000 hard-core watch nuts really like are mechanical watches: all power provided by an unwinding spring, the way all watches were before the first quartz watches were introduced in the 1960's. Mechanical watches keep time much less accurately than quartz watches. There actually are a few mechanical watches which keep time better than some quartz watches, but we're talking about extremely expensive mechanical watches and cheap junk quartz watches.

This is not utility. It's art. 

 

 

Women have shoes, men have watches. Sure, it's weird, but hey -- life is weird.

Smart watches, from Apple etc, don't do a thing for me. As far as I'm concerned, they're just smart phones on the wrist, and I already have a smart phone. I don't feel the need to have 2.

I've actually always been into mechanical watches. I still have 2 Timex mechanical watches made no later than the 1980's. Could be 1970's. They both stopped running long ago and old mechanical Timexes can't be repaired any more than Bic lighters can be. If memory serves, they cost $8.95 or maybe less. At Walgreen's. Actually, I have 3 Timex mechanicals: I bought an automatic Timex at a yard sale in Alaska for $2. It was made in 1979 (I looked up the serial number), and it ran for quite a while after I bought it.

But all Timexes, old or new, are crap, despite the 1 in 100,000 which runs for 40 years. The new Marlin is the first mechanical watch sold by Timex in quite a long time, and a lot of people who think they're experts on the subject of watches are going crazy over it, but they're fools. You can get 6 new mechanical Seiko 5's for the price of one new Marlin ($300 and a long waiting list, unless Timex has ramped production way, way up since the launch a couple of years ago), and each Seiko would be a far, far better watch.

But the new $300 Timex Marlin reminds all those people of the Timexes they (or their Dads or Grandpas) bought at Walgreens in the 60's and 70's for $5 or $10. Timex are evil geniuses at marketing. [PS, 22 Feb 2021: I really must apologize. It would've been so easy to check BEFORE I published. It appears that the MSRP for the Marlin has fallen to $199, that it is often on sale for less than $150, and that it is now offered in a variety of colors besides the silver which gave the original its name.]

in 1990, in Germany, I bought a mechanical pocket watch for about 60 Marks -- about $40. I don't remember the brand, but it felt really solid. It seemed like a quality product, the way well-built watches feel. Then back in the US it was stolen, and I bummed over that for a long time.

A few years ago, the only watches about which I could find any info were Swiss watches costing 4 figures and up, and pure crap costing less, and antique pocket watches which are not always very expensive to purchase and which often keep very good time when they're running, but which require a lot of expensive maintenance. Plus a lot of quartz watches, which almost never interest me. Then I happened to see a headline in a Google search saying, "The Most Affordable High-End Watch." I was skeptical, but I clicked on it, and it was an article about a Seiko 5 that cost $45. Calling it "high-end" was tongue-in-cheek -- -- but only a little bit. The article explained how this $45 watch had a lot of the qualities prized by guys who buy extremely-expensive Swiss watches and was an insane value.

So that was  how I was made aware of Seiko, and it opened up the world of watches quite a bit to me. And now I'm one of a billion a-holes trying to make a living writing nonsense about watches on the Internet.

The watch world has its own rules and customs. It's different from the car world. One example of many: vehicle manufacturers loan vehicles to periodicals, which sometimes praise the vehicles and sometimes trash them. Watch manufacturers loan (or sometimes secretly give) watches to periodicals, and in return they expect that the reviewers will not write anything bad about the watch, or only enough tiny bad remarks to keep convincing readers that these are actual reviews. There is very little honest journalism about watches. The vast majority of people posing as watch reviewers amount to paid advertisers. And all of the experts in the watch world know it. And it doesn't seem it's going to change soon. And so, sadly, since I can't bring myself to write even more nonsensically than I already do, it seems that I will NOT soon be showered with free luxury watches. (Unless I become a huge fabulous superstar.)

Seiko

More and more people are coming to the opinion that Seiko, a Japanese company, is the world's greatest watchmaker. 

 

For about a century, after the American watchmaking industry fell apart, Swiss watches have generally been regarded as the state of the art. Three Swiss brands, Patek Philippe, Audemars Piguet and Vacheron Constantine, are often referred to together as "the Holy Trinity," reflecting the opinion that they are as good as it gets. Recently, however, Jaeger-LeCoultre, a fourth Swiss brand, has been mentioned as being equal to or even better than the Holy Trinity, as has A Lange & Soehne, which is not even Swiss, it's a German brand, one of several in the small town of Glashuette in the former East Germany.

And then of course are the many, many people who say that Rolex is the best. We laugh and pat them on the head and get back to what we were discussing before they interrupted us. Rolex watches are good. They're not the very best. And they're overpriced. And even if you pay full MSRP for a new and soght-after Rolex model, you're going to be on a waiting list. For years, sometimes. 

Why? Because when you ask most people to list off luxury watch brands, they'll say, "Rolex... Uhmmm..." If people literally don't know that your competition exists, you will outsell your competition.

And then there's Seiko, which is a bit different from all the other brands mentioned so far. All of them are exclusively luxury brands, offering watches for four figures and up. Some people are surprised to hear Seiko being compared to Swiss luxury brands, because they believe that Seiko make inexpensive watches.

And they do. The thing is, they make luxury watches too. You can get a Seiko for $50, or $500,000 or at every price point in between. That alone makes them unique. What makes them great is that they offer the best value at any price point. You can get a great Seiko watch for $200. By "great" I mean, quite simply: better than anything else on sale for $200. You can get one for $400. Or $1000. Or $5000. Etc. And in each and every case, the Seiko will be the best that can be had for that much money. 

Tissot says, "They say a high-end Swiss mechanical watch can't be had for less than $1000. Let's keep proving them wrong." Audemars Piguet says, "People who are willing to spend $10,000 for a watch look to us to provide the ultimate in horological luxury. Let's keep refining and deepening that experience." And both Tissot and Audemars Piguet are both accomplishing great things. But Seiko says, "Let's keep beating everybody at everything." They're not just in their own league. They're playing a completely different game.

How do they do it? Experts are mystified. Seiko don't skimp on materials. They don't run sweatshops. Their highly-skilled employees are compensated as well as they would be at other firms.

I'm taking a guess here: maybe Seiko's prices are the best because they have a firm policy that their prices will be the best. Maybe, before a Seiko model is introduced, Seiko looks at the prices of comparable watches, and offers their for less, period, whether they're taking a big loss short-term or not, and it all comes out all alright for them because the prices are one of the reasons for Seiko's huge sales and extremely loyal repeat customers.

That Springsteen Jeep Commercial

At age 71, Bruce Springsteen did the first commercial in his life, a commercial for Jeep. It aired during the Super Bowl, 3 days ago. Many people were furious that Jeep had made a commercial with "that plony libtard Springsteen." Then it came to light that Springsteen got a DUI last year, and Jeep pulled the ad.

The fact that Springsteen did a Jeep commercial -- weird. People getting all upset over the commercial -- also weird. (Jeez, it's a COMMERCIAL. Unclench.) Jeep pulling the ad because Springsteen got a DUI last year -- I'm gonna stick with "weird." 

PS: The whole fake-cowboy thing Bruce has been doing on and off since 1978 -- definitely weird. What IS that accent he sometimes sings with? Woody Guthrie never sounded anything like that. When Bruce tries to sing all country, he sounds like he's about to sneeze while having a stroke. Beyond weird.

William Carlos Williams wrote, "All pure products of America go crazy." Elvis Presley -- check. Michael Jackson -- check. Bruce Springsteen -- check.

General Motors and Electric Vehicles

The first mass-produced modern electric car was the EV-1, made by General Motors beginning in 1996. Over a thousand EV-1's were leased -- not sold -- to customers primarily in California. Then in 2002 and 2003, all of the EV-1 leases were ended by GM, who collected all of the vehicles and destroyed them. 

 

Then, in 2006, GM began development of the electric Chevy Volt, which went on sale late in 2010, and from then until the present day, General Motors has been selling electric vehicles -- with less than complete enthusiasm, although so far, after the EV-1, they have not gone so far again as to destroy any of their own cars.

Last Sunday, GM ran a Super Bowl ad in which Will Ferrell hears the news that Norway bought more EV's than ICE (Internal-Combustion Engine) vehicles in 2020, and goes on a rampage, vowing that the US will outdo Norway in this. Also on Sunday, commentaries appeared saying that, although the commercial is wonderful, GM itself is a big part of the reason why currently EV's account for only about 3% of new car and truck sales in the US, compared to 54% in Norway, pointing out that GM lobbies heavily against fuel-economy regulations, which a company set on pivoting to EV's would not do. And recently, GM has announced its intention to produce only zero-emissions vehicle by 2035. 

Many people, in the light of all of this, have described GM's attitude toward EV's as schizophrenic. But "schizophrenic" implies one mind which is in conflict with itself, whereas GM consists of hundreds of thousands of employees who have routinely held sharply conflicting opinions about all sorts of things, EV's being just one example. GM is a very different company than Tesla, which is basically a cult built to do the Will of Elon. Was the EV-1 designed and built by very enthusiastic GM employees? Yes indeed. Was it at the same time viewed with horror by other GM employees, further to the Right politically, who saw it as a hippy monstrosity? Without a doubt. I also have no doubt that many at GM are very happy that their company has committed to zero emissions by 2035, and that many others believe that global warming is a hoax, perhaps Chinese in origin.

Like the rest of the world generally, GM is moving toward a more enlightened stance on the environment, while being hindered by many individuals dragging their feet, some out of conviction and others out of greed. The situation is complicated, and some parts of GM are fighting other parts.

Speaking of complication: that same Norway which is doing such a fine job of switching over to clean energy usage domestically, is also one of the world's biggest exporters of oil.

Homer Removed From School Curriculum

Those Massachusetts Puritans. Yeah, just lately a ninth-grade teacher in Lawrence, Massachusetts succeeded in removing Homer's Odyssey from the curriculum of the school where she teaches, [PS: It seems the Odyssey may have been removed from a single class, not from use by the entire school. I was taken in by right-wing sources who deliberately exaggerated the affair to suit their agenda and stir up fears of cancel culture. I'll try to be more careful. Amusingly, however, because this post contained that error, a link to it was removed from a sub-Reddit.] but 330 years ago they were executing people they believed to be witches, so in a way this is progress. I bet those witch-burners didn't read Homer either.

 

In an online discussion of this curriculum change, someone said that in the case of this school in Massachusetts, no one was being told not to read Homer, because he was not being removed from the curriculum of a Classics department. 

Of course people are being told here not to read Homer. That is literally no more and no less than what this little news item is about. The ninth-grade students of this teacher, who is being paid by some public or private entity to tell them what to think of this or that author, are being told not to read Homer. Now how will these kids understand the jokes in O Brother, Where Art Thou?

And if this particular school ever had a Classics department, I'm pretty sure it was removed from the school some time ago. As have many other Classics departments in the US and elsewhere. Don't tell me that there's no connection between removing Homer from an English or comparative lit curriculum and removing an entire Classics department from the face of the Earth, cause I ain't quite that stupid, cause I've read a lot of good books including some stuff by Homer! So just, don't!

It's true that there has been a lot of sexism, racism, classism and other forms of bigotry in the teaching of the Classics over the course of the centuries. I think the thing to do is to remove the sexism, racism, classism and other forms of bigotry from the teaching of the Classics, rather than removing the Classics themselves. When Homer is removed from curricula, when Classics department are done away with, although it's usually done in the name of the Left, all that is accomplished is that all of that good stuff once again becomes the preserve of the bigots. This is not an advance, it's a retreat.

The same holds true with those among Catholic Leftists who identify Latin masses, and the study of Latin (and therefore also Greek because they're really not wholly separable) in general with the Right. The Left needs to go into, much further into the study of the Classics. 

Buy some copies of Homer and smuggle them into the benighted town of Lawrence. Help those kids out.

Dream Log: Watership Down

I dreamed that it was a COVID-free present time and that I was working on the set of a hugely ambitious movie project: 24 movies were going to be directed by 24 prominent directors, and it was intended that they would be connected, in the following manner: the movies would be filmed one by one, the director of each succeeding movie would watch the previous one before starting filming, and -- that was about as thoroughly as it was explained to me, a coffee-fetching flunkie. If this flappodoodle was actually any better organized than that, I didn't see the organizing principle. 

There was a reception attended by the 24 illustrious directors as well as many of us who were going to work on all 24 movies. Along a wall were 24 posters, one for each movie, each with a director's name and a description of the screenplay from which his or her movie would be made. The 2nd movie would be directed by Ridley Scott, and the screenplay was based on Richard Adams' novel Watership Down, whose protagonists are wild rabbits. 

 

The plot of the novel has to do with a small group of rabbits in England who must find a new home. They fight their way cross-country until they come to a hill known to humans, although not to them, as Watership Down. In my memory of the novel, although perhaps not in the novel itself, the rabbits rarely see humans, until at Watership Down they see a small boy who often sits by himself on the hillside. Although they distrust the boy, it turns out that he never does them any harm, and he grows up to be a novelist named Richard Adams.

I read Watership Down 47 years ago, and from what I remembered of it, I thought that Ridley Scott might make a very interesting movie of it. And I said so, out loud, at this reception. Ridley Scott heard me, and seemed annoyed. I didn't know whether he was annoyed because he'd read or heard about some of the things I've written about him, things which are by no means all flattering, or if it was just that he considered himself to be film making royalty, and I to be a peasant who was to hold his tongue among his betters, or what.

Someone raised the question of when, exactly, the next director in line was going to see the previous film. If he or she was to see it when the public did, then there would be a wait of as long as a year, or perhaps much longer than that, between each film. If, however, the next director could see a rough cut as soon as shooting was finished, that might reduce the time between movies from years to three weeks or so. 

I thought this was a very good point. If the next director was going to wait until the previous film was completely edited, scored, re-shot and so forth, before starting the next film, this project could take 24 years, or much longer than that. If the next director saw a rough cut after three weeks' worth of principal photography, as it's known, that would bring the total time for the project down to a couple of years.

I had two thoughts: one, that letting the next director see the rough cut was a very good idea, and two, that this entire project, as a whole, might be a very, very bad idea. I wondered whether it might be best to bail out right away.

From this point in the dream, the setting, the year and my age all changed several times. First, I became the boy Richard Adams in early 20th century rural England, observing rabbits and dodging adult humans. For the rest of the dream, I felt somewhat like a rabbit, especially inasmuch as I felt danger to be coming from most of the humans I met.

Then I was a somewhat older Richard Adams, about 18 years old and a new student at a university. I was bullied by other students and by faculty. 

Then the time changed to the 1970's. I was Steven Bollinger again, but I was a young adult, slightly older than I was in the real 1970's. I was at the same university somewhere inside a large city in England. My status -- student, faculty, or something else -- was uncertain. I took a break from the unpleasant and mysterious rituals of the humans to go outside and observe some wild rabbits.

One of the rabbits approached me, neither timid not hostile. Quite unusual behavior for a wild rabbit, to say the least. The rabbit attempted to speak to me in a human voice, but what came out was unintelligible squeaking to me. After a while the rabbit had to go. It seemed disappointed that it had not been able to convey whatever message it had. I nodded and gestured in a way I hoped the rabbit would understand as friendly. It nodded back. Clearly, we were expressing and understanding goodwill, if nothing else. The rabbit hopped away.

Then I was in Detroit in the present time (COVID-free again), although I was much younger than in waking life. I was at another unspecified university. It was distinct from the English university, although not drastically different in appearance: the interiors in both places had a lot of hardwood and tile, old and a little worn but still looking very sturdy. The students in both places seemed more working- than middle class: somewhat serious, not assured that they were going to be able to just coast through life if they so chose. Again, my status, student, faculty or something else, was uncertain. 

I ended up at a counter, doing some paperwork together with some young people behind the counter. It was clear that they were both students and university employees. The paperwork took on the quality of a board game or a card game. The mood was lightened because the students clearly understood that there was an element of the absurd in this clerical task which had to be done before I could get on with things. These students made a sharp contrast to the stereotypical, but sometimes also real embittered employees of large organizations who seem determined not to make one damned thing one damned bit easier for anybody unless there's something in it for them. These students actually seemed to care about me and to want to make this paperwork process as enjoyable, or at last as painless, as possible. Not only were they a sharp contrast to some other workers in similar situations, they were also a sharp contrast to the other people in the dream, most of whom up until then had been somewhere between indifferent and hostile to me. Then I woke up.