Celebrities and Rolex

Just because you have a wonderful talent for acting or singing, or playing the baritone sax, or cooking while talking to cameras about cooking, or even all of the above, there's no guarantee that you will know much at all about any other given thing. Luxury watches, for example. Ask the average person to list as many brands of luxury watches as they can, and they'll say: "Rolex... Uhhhh... Ummmm..."

And celebrities seem to be pretty average when it comes to watches. Over and over again, a headline about some celebrity's watch collection leads to a story about a collection of Rolexes (also known as "the genuine fake Timexes"), or a collection of mostly Rolexes. Over and over again, some person whose talents apart from the world of watches impresses me very much, has disappointed me in this way. I'm just about all out of hope. 

I don't have a lot of room to complain here. Faithful readers of this blog may recall that after suddenly developing a fascination with watches around 2010, and before reaching a certain level of sophistication in my knowledge of watches more recently, I myself, for a couple of years, was fascinated by, indeed, somewhat obsessed with, a certain Rolex model, the platinum Daytona on a platinum bracelet:

Which is a perfectly fine watch. All Rolexes are very high-quality, very dependable and accurate timepieces. Rolex is also an extremely conservative brand, to the point of being boring, with very slight changes in styling and function coming only once in a great while. Also, a Rolex typically will cost about twice as much as an Omega made from comparable materials, with comparable function and quality.

And some might argue that Omegas, too, are somewhat overpriced, because, although, as I mentioned above, Rolex is the only luxury watch brand of which many people have heard, if they've heard of two, there's a good chance that the second brand is Omega, so that their prices may be due more to marketing than to any inherent quality in their products.

Now let's compare this to the point of view of someone who actually knows a bit about luxury watches. Among real connoisseurs, there are three Swiss brands which for decades have been considered the pinnacle of watchmaking: Patek Philippe, Audemars Piguet and Vacheron Constantine. Apart from things like very small specialty brands who turn out one custom-made hand-made watch every several years at a price of several million dollars, these three brands have widely been considered to be the very best there is. Although recently, some would say that a fourth Swiss brand, Jaeger-LeCoultre, should be considered alongside or even above the Holy Trinity, and some would say that the German manufacturer A Lange & Soehne is right up there, and others would say Grand Seiko, which recently split off from the Japanese brand Seiko.

All of the brands mentioned so far are relatively conservative in styling. Two Swiss brands which are definitely outside the box with their designs, but which still don't seem to offend the snobs, are MB&F and Urwerk. Two brands which are way outside of the box, which definitely DO offend snobs, are Hublot and Richard Mille. In my opinion, with watches as with anything else, I think that if you give any weight to the opinions and nasty remarks of snobs, it's a real shame. 

But anyway, Rolex is just not in that upper echelon. Someone who really knows about all of those other brands may sneer at you for wearing a Rolex, or make some nasty remark about Rolex being God's way of marking fools who until recently had too much money. Or, if they're nice, they might say that if you're sure you can afford it, and you're sure that it's really really the watch you want, then a Rolex is a fine watch. (And they wouldn't be lying.) But they also might urge you to shop around a little in the other brands I've mentioned, and there are still others that could be mentioned, dozens of brands which are just as good as, if not better than Rolex.

So, why is Rolex so much more well-known? It's rather mysterious. It's as if Mercedes-Benz were the only luxury auto brand people had ever heard of -- unless maybe they'd also heard of BMW (in analogy to Omega).

Many watch brands, including Rolex, have what are known as "brand ambassadors," famous people who wear their watches in public in exchanges for free watches, or money, or both. Rolex has brand ambassadors -- perhaps it won't shock you to learn that Jack Nicklaus is one -- and they have ads in fancy magazines. But not enough of either one to explain their complete world domination. Not enough to explain why there are waiting lists years long for the choicest Rolex models.

I just had a sinister idea. The fact that most celebrities who collect watches, collect Rolexes and not much else, is tremendous advertising for Rolex. Maybe Rolex has many more brand ambassadors than they admit. Maybe they have shadowy agents everywhere in the world of fame. Whenever a performer or athlete seems about to break through into fame, perhaps the anonymous Rolex guy appears and says, "Hey, Rolex admires what you do. And we'd like you to have a Rolex on us -- Hell, take two, they're small! Heh heh heh. Yeah, there are some vintage watches in there with the new ones. You could mix it up. New is interesting. Old is interesting in a different way. We'd just ask one favor: don't tell anybody that Rolex gave these watches to you. Let people think that you bought them. And then maybe I'll come around to visit you on a regular basis."

Yes, that's a rather extreme speculation of mendacity. But Rolex has a rather extreme position in the watch market. It's extremely difficult to explain.

Swiss Watches

Geneva is in the easternmost corner of Switzerland, surround by France to the north, east and south. From Geneva the Swiss-French border runs about 100 miles, as the crow flies, to Basel, where the Swiss, French and German borders all meet. The area along this Swiss-French border between Geneva and Basel is quite mountainous, and was somewhat isolated before the invention of the railroad. In the early 18th century, most of the Swiss people living along this border were farmers. But snow prevented them from growing anything for about 6 months of the year. So they began to make parts for watches, to earn a little extra money. Many of them soon found out that they could make more money making these watch parts than by farming, and began to make watches all year round, and their descendants have been watchmakers ever since. That's why so many big Swiss watchmakers are headquartered in tiny little Swiss mountain villages.

At first, Swiss watchmakers mostly concentrated on making inexpensive products. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the US was known as the place where the best watches were made. But by the mid-20th century, Swiss watches considered the best, and many of them had become quite expensive. Swiss watchmakers prided themselves in making their watches more and more accurate and precise.

Then quartz watches appeared. In the early 1970's, quartz watches made all over the world were more accurate than the finest spring-driven Swiss watches at a fraction of the price. In Switzerland, this time is called the Quartz Crisis.

Some Swiss watchmakers responded by making their own quartz watches. Many went out of business. Some of the oldest makers of fine watches were bought up by the Swatch Group, named after Swatches, the cheap, colorful, mostly quartz-driven watches which were a popular fad in the 1970's. As of 2002, Breguet, Blancpain, Leon Hatot, Jacques Droz, Glashuette, Omega, Longines, Rado, Tissot, Calvin Klein Watches, Union, Certina, Mido, Hamilton and Flik Flak belonged to the Swatch Group, along with Swatch itself, which is still around and still makes watches, mostly quartz but also some mechanical ones. How good are Swatch watches? I have no idea.

ETA is a Swiss company which mostly makes watch movements. A movement is the motor of a watch. ETA makes both quartz and mechanical movements. Many watchmakers both in Switzerland and in other parts of the world use ETA movements in some or all of their watches.

Some Swiss watchmakers have remained proudly independent, not being bought by the Swatch Group or any other corporate conglomerate, and making most or all of the movements for their own watches. (Watch afficienados and watch snobs have long and heated arguments about just how important it is for watchmakers to use movements they have made themselves -- also referred to as "in-house movements.") Three such companies, held in such high esteem that many people referred to them as the "Holy Trinity," are Patek Philippe (established in 1851), Vacheron Constantine (est 1755) and Audemars Piguet (est 1875). Although, these days, some would say that Jaeger-Lecoultre (est 1833) has become better than any of them. One thing's for sure: all 4 of those companies make very high-quality watches, at prices ranging from 4 to 7 figures per watch.

And new watch companies are springing up all the time, in Switzerland and elsewhere, some making cheap crap and others making very good watches, and some in between.

But not very many new pocket watches, which makes me sad. And most of the new pocket watches seem made for nostalgia, imitating old ones instead of trying to embrace being new, and that makes me sadder. As an extreme example: the new Omega pocket watches actually ARE old to a great degree: their movements were made in the 1930's. Recently someone found these 80-year-old watch movements in a warehouse, and Omega decided to refurbish them to make expensive nostalgic pocket watches. Make new watches which are proud of being new, I say, and don't insist that we wear all of them on our wrists! I can't be the only guy in the world who feels this way, although maybe I am.

Tantalum

If someone asks: what's the good of being obsessed with watches which are much too expensive for you to afford (for the moment, although of course all that will change when yr rich and famous), the answer is: you learn things.

And if they say: Oh yeah? What kind of things? you can say:

Well, for instance, just now, just this very minute, I learned of the existence of a metal about which I had not known, called tantalum or tantalium. How did I learn about it? This is how:

This watch has a case and bezel made of tantalum. I found this watch by doing a Google Shopping search for Panerai -- which is a brand of Swiss watch, and, as far as I know, unaffiliated with Panera,

the restaurant chain which is proud of its fancy bread. I looked up the watch, and saw that its case is made of tantalium or tantalum, and then I looked up tantalum.

Tantalum was discovered in 1802 by the Swedish chemist Anders Ekeberg. It has an attractive blue-gray metallic luster, and a specific gravity of 16.69, which means that it is a little more than twice as heavy as iron, about 1 1/2 times as heavy as lead, about 85% as heavy as gold and 75% as heavy as platinum, and yes I know that I said "heavy" instead of "dense" and I don't care, because I'd rather be understood than meaninglessly precise. In addition to being very heavy, tantalum is ductile, very hard, easily fabricated, highly conductive of heat and electricity, and extraordinarily resistant to corrosion by acids.

How much does Tantalum cost? That's a very good question. I have consulted many sources about this question, and they are unanimous in giving these 2 answers: "Contact us and we'll quote you a price right away!" and "Here, let us sell you some of this tantalite instead!" Tantalite is an ore which contains tantalum. How difficult is it to extract the tantalum from tantalite? I have no idea whatsoever.

They (scientists, not the merchants offering tantalite for sale online) say that there is about 2000 times more tantalum than gold in the Earth's crust, and about 700 times more tantalum than platinum. How do they know such things? Don't ask me. I still can't wrap my mind around how people tell time by looking at things in the sky, which they've been doing for thousands of years. There are lots and lots of things I don't know and/or can't comprehend, things which are very basic to some other people.

And I know all of this because of my interest in the expensive watches, and for no other reason. Can you get a brand-new tantalum Panerai right now, or is the tantalum just something they did with a few watches in the past? That I don't know.

A Non-Laughing Cassandra

Maybe there's some way to get the attention of someone who wields real power at a huge corporation and tell them that you have an idea that would actually help them. I am not familiar with this way.

For example, Amazon.

Years ago I tried to get a job with Amazon, just correcting the errors on the website about what languages books are in. Because there were enough such errors that correcting would keep at least one brilliant person, such as myself, busy full-time -- and it would be a good investment for Amazon too, right? Imagine, all those customers finally actually finding what they'd been looking for. No-one I was able to reach was interested in the slightest, or even gave any sign that they understood what I was talking about. Have they made progress on that problem in the meantime? I have no idea, I no longer scour the Amazon website looking for such errors.

And then there are fake luxury-watch reviews. Not paid-for reviews, but reviews by people who think they're funny, saying things like, "This Rolex is great, and having to sell my house in order to buy it was a small price to pay. I'm very happy living out here in the woods," etc. There are who knows how many thousands of such reviews of expensive watches on Amazon, which are basically the same joke: "This here watch is real expensive, hyuck hyuck hyuck!" and none of which are funny. Or at least there were many thousands of such reviews. It's been a while since I've looked at any reviews of watches on Amazon. I sent a couple of messages to Amazon describing the problem, and I moved on. They could fix the problem by limiting reviews of expensive watches to people who've bought those watches, or similar ones.

Where's that on-ramp between me and things I could do something about?

Is it crammed with exactly the same morons who make all those lame jokes about the watches, making me a needle of reason in a haystack of stupidity?

I Like Cookies

I'm talking about HTTP cookies, the bits of information which companies collect when we're online and then trade with each other. The ones which some people think are part of the way that we will fall under the Total Control of capitalists, or possible even of The Machines Themselves.

And maybe they're right. After all, what do I know about information technology. But the thing is, cookies can also lead to me being informed about really cool expensive watches because companies think I might be a billionaire. For example: yesterday, I posted this picture on Facebook:

That's a wristwatch. The thing is, it's a wristwatch which costs several hundred thousand dollars. So today, I saw ads for other watches which cost even more. Including even some brand-new, retail available pocket watches. Like this one,

made by Audemars Piguet, the company I mentioned a few post back, in the post that started out being about LeBron James and then veered off into another post about watches. Audemars Piguet make the Royal Oak, possibly the world's heaviest production-model wristwatch, won by LeBron on the cover of Sports Illustrated and by Jeremy Piven on "Entourage." The pocket watch in the picture there is the Audemars Piguet 25701, which comes in a variety of styles and materials and seems to cost from a little under $800,000 to over $900,000. The one in the picture has a rose-gold case. I'm assuming that it weighs even more than the heaviest of all Audemars Piguet Royal Oak wristwatches.

But I have to assume. Because the Internet is made by people very much unlike me. If it were made by people like me, and catered to the interests of people like me, I would have easy access to information about the exact weight of every conceivable sort of watch, and I would have found out about extremely-expensive brand-new production-model retail-available pocket watches without accidentally having advertisements for them put onto the Internet pages I visit because yesterday I posted a picture of Hublot MP-05 LaFerrari on Facebook. The MP-05 is the watch in the first photo in this post. It's a manual hand-wind wristwatch. Its face is intentionally made to resemble the engine of a Ferrari. When it's wound up all the way it will run for 50 days, the longest of any watch of which I know. If the Internet catered specifically to my interests, I would know for sure whether or not there is a watch somewhere which runs for longer than 50 days after being wound once. But it's not. And so I just have to guess about some things. And I apologize for that.

And I also have to guess whether more pocket watches in the $1000-to-$1,000,000 price range are being made and offered for sale than a few years ago, or whether I'm simply aware of a few more than I used to be. Partly as a result of dogged online searching, and partly completely by accident because of things like posting that picture on Facebook yesterday. I'm really whacky about pocket watches. Wristwatches are nice, sure, but I like pocket watches a lot more. And only mechanical watches interest me: the kind you wind up by hand, or, slightly less interesting, those watches which are known as automatic or self-winding: they have innards (called movements) which are similar to those in the watches you must wind by hand, but the automatic or self-winding watches are also wound by being moved around as someone wears them on their wrists. The ones with the quartz batteries, they don't interest me much at all, and if I'm looking at a watch or a picture of a watch or a watch on TV, and I realize that it runs by quartz battery, I'm always very disappointed. Why? I don't know why. I think that almost any rational reasons why anyone would be interested in having any sort of watch at all disappeared years ago, when things like smartphones and clocks on microwaves and car dashboards and what have you became ubiquitous.

Why the $1000-to-$1,000,000 price range? Not because I can afford a $1000 watch. I can't. But because the Watch Snob wrote that you have to spend at least $1000 to get a really good watch, unless you get a pocket watch which is 100 years old or so, and take it to a good watch repair person. How would one find a competent watch repair person? I don't know. Maybe I will stumble across that information someday too.

So: in this case, cookies did exactly what they were intended to do: gave information to someone, me, about things he is interested in, ridiculously-expensive brand-new pocket watches. Now, if cookies could go one step further, and help that person, me, obtain enough money to actually buy the things in question -- now that would really be something. That would really be a miracle of information technology.