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.