fine whine

Few of my timepieces* display the correct time. In the house we do have one clock (actually a weather station) that syncs itself with the signal from that atomic clock in Colorado, but all the others range anywhere from a minute off to half an hour or more.

My wristwatches, when not out of commission or battery, are all at least a couple minutes fast, generally around seven.

My car has two digital clocks in it (both factory installed, no less) and they're both wrong, though within twenty seconds of each other. They're ten minutes fast, tested against the NPR announcer's clock almost daily.

Ten minutes is also the amount of time it takes for me to drive to work in the morning. Knowing that, as soon as I sit down in the car I know what time I'll be at work, all without doing any mental math**.

As nifty a trick as this may be, I'm working on my morning routine so that as soon as I get out of bed I know what time I'll sit down in the car. I'm within five minutes, I think, but I know I can improve my time.

Then again, it's just a matter of time before one of us clumsily fat-fingers the time-setting buttons searching for the snooze button, anyway.

* Because I seem to be writing about time so frequently, I have created a corresponding 'time' category. It's about time, eh?

** Closing my eyes while driving is something I've tried to avoid, over the years, to the extent that I am capable of, and moreover inclined to, sneeze with my eyes open.

I'm filing this under coincidences because it is, more or less, one of them.

This morning as I picked out my wristwatch* I glanced at it to see if it was running. Its minute and second hands pointed between 8 and 9, so I figured that it being somewhere between 8:33 and 8:45 am (given the fact that my watches are all between 0 and 7 minutes fast) was fine, and hurried off to work.

It was only later, about twenty minutes later, in fact, that I noticed the time on my watch hadn't changed. In fact it had stopped sometime yesterday (8:42 am or pm), and I had somehow managed to look at it during the window today when the time was more or less correct. I hadn't looked at the date.

Fully knowing, then, that it isn't running, I've checked it at least three times today. Still wrong. It'll be right tonight, though.

* Not being much of an accessories fellow, the only fashion/jewelry indulgence I have is my collection of watches. I could wear a different one each day to work, and even coordinate them to the outfits, to some degree. Today, being 'casual Friday', I grabbed one with a leather cuff to give my t-shirt and baggy jeans that extra street touch. Or skater, or punk, or whatever.

What does it say about me about that I've been wearing a watch all day, and only now, at lunchtime, have I noticed that I forgot to set it* this morning. What does that say about me?

Other than that I need to get one of those automatic watch winding machines?

But would one of those really help? Half of my watches (of the ones not broken) are set seven minutes ahead or more and the others are within seven seconds of real time.

Too bad I can't remember which ones are which.

* It's one of my automatics. The Waltham, if it matters to you. What mattered to me, other than the fact that it was self-winding, was that it had an orange second hand. That, and it was a really cheap Waltham.

So now it's 2006. Our plans fell through, and Jessica and the cat abandoned me so I rang in this year by myself (well, I suppose the people apparently detonating small explosives count too since they sounded awfully close).

Which isn't that big of a deal, anyway. It's just another night; one that divides the days dates are written with a twelve at the beginning and one number at the end*, and then dates with a one at the beginning and that old number plus one at the end. Big deal. I write about ten checks a year.

I watch a lot of movies, though, and tonight was no exception. First in the lineup was the 1976 Bad news Bears and, even though it maybe wasn't an out-of-the-park home run, it wasn't just a caught pop fly.

Enough with the baseball terminology. Thankfully the movie doesn't dwell in it, instead focusing on some well-played kids (even if they can't play the game all that well) and a surprisingly good Walter Matthau. He's an actor that has turned in many a good role (Hopscotch is one of the more underrated gems of the Criterion Collection) and here as a casual alcoholic he's just as good as ever. His changes of heart may be a bit sudden, but never as jarring as they might otherwise be in the hands of someone else. The kids, though, prove to be just as much up to the task, including an impressive Tatum O'Neal (who, in doing nothing impressive after Paper moon, may have been cast as the 'old pro' brought in to help out the amateurs in something of a canny, if unintended move), though many a fair-haired buck-toothed boy gets mixed up with another. The movie stands apart from other underdog movies for many a reason, and most make it worth watching. I may check out the remake sometime, just to see what seasoned vets like Richard Linklater and Billy Bob Thornton can do with the same material, but I'm in no hurry. This one's good enough.

To end the year on a more serious note, I next watched Woody Allen's Hannah and her sisters. This wasn't the first time I'd grabbed it at the library; I'd often checked it out but had lighter fare to watch first, or just wanted something less, well, less about three sisters and their romantic entanglements in New York City. But in Woody Allen's hands it's not nearly as bad as something sounding like that could be.

After all, imagine Nora Ephron tackling the same idea. Or don't.

The way Allen writes it it's touching, clever, intelligent and funny, and well worth watching. Almost every character is convincingly fleshed out, and Woody's neurotic nebbish has rarely been more believable. Michael Caine is a bit creepy as an adulterous husband, and it's difficult to pin down if he's playing an American or Brit or someone from somewhere else, for all that matters. In the end it's not about where everybody came from, but where they end up and how they get there that matters, and everybody, Woody and Mia Farrow and Dianne Wiest and Sam Waterston and Michael Caine and Max Von Sydow (whose severe artist criticizes TV at one point, his comments no less timely now than they were then; the title of this post is a quote from the scene) and Carrie Fisher and all the rest make for a great movie about love and families and everything in between.

I split my viewing of it, however, to catch the yearly ball-dropping in Times Square. I'm no longer certain why I do this other than to know the correct moment the year turns, since my watches and clocks are all different. I don't care about the people on TV, don't watch the flavor-of-the-month performances and interviews before and after the drop, and don't want to think about all of the garbage littering the Square after the millions file out.

They mentioned that a literal ton (2000 pounds) of confetti was to be thrown on the crowd, they with their big balloons and streamers and promotional hats and stupid, stupid, stupid '2006' glasses, and I could see the few empty inches of pavement behind the announcers (somehow I ended up seeing Carson Daly instead of Dick Clark. The new year came anyway) already covered in garbage even before the climactic last moments.

And for what? Some of those people had been standing around since noon, and that's not even considering the travel time that most of them, out-of-towners, also endured. And without public restrooms, apparently. So they came all that way, and waited all that time, and they couldn't give a crap.

Har har. Happy New Year, for what it's worth.

* I refer, of course, to the dreadful 'month day, year' notation that has so caught Americans' fancy. Why, oh why, ask I, can't we use the much nicer, more logical 'day month year' that so much of the rest of the world uses?

I hate to do this to y'all, but ladies and gentleman, I am attempting to turn over a something of a new leaf. You see, 2 A.M. (EST) is too late to go to bed every night. This of course is not your fault, as I generally tell you that I'm going to bed a while before I actually do, in fact, go to bed.

It's not a lie, it's just a little stretch of the truth. Does that make me a dishonest person?

I'm a negative person. Or so it seems lately. This does not make me happy*. I'm also one to occasionally dodge culpability, so I'm putting the blame on those late nights. Lack of sleep and whatnot.

It's probably a completely incorrect diagnosis, but it's what I'm going with for right now.

In the few days that I've started getting to bed before 1:30 (once even before 12:45) I've not necessarily been more pleasant. I've been no meaner, to boot.

I've also been waking up earlier, since I'm stuck in that rut of however many hours of sleep I'm used to getting, from between two or three when I fall asleep until five sometime when Jessica's alarm sounds.

Of course I very rarely hear her alarm, or at least react to it in a way that I can remember later. When she leaves for work and I fall back asleep, I generally don't even notice it, until I wake up at eight sometime (my clock is rather... inaccurate. Consistent, but inaccurate) and hastily rush myself off to work.

So that's how things were before. Lately I've awoken before my alarm, sometimes even having moments of dreams. Happy dreams.

So what I'm trying to tell you is that I'm trying to go to bed earlier.

But enough about me. Let's get back to the west coast.

Tonight I watched The Hitcher. It's the story of a guy who's trying to get to San Diego.

At first I didn't quite understand why driving a Cadillac from Chicago to San Diego would place our protagonist in the middle of nowhere Texas. After I watched the movie I checked out the route, and realized/remembered that the vast majority of the middle of these great States of ours isn't crisscrossed with convenient diagonal highways. A flying crow wouldn't cross the Lone Star state's borders (barring poor air conditions) but those confined to wheels on the ground find themselves at the mercy of the interstate highway grid, and that grid appears to pass through Amarillo between the city of broad shoulders and America's finest city (or so they say).

But our protagonist, played by the same guy I'd last seen (and only seen) in Soul man, is at the mercy of something much more sinister. He encounters Rutger Hauer, who I'd last seen (and possibly, again, only seen) in Blade runner, an enigmatic dark stranger who seems to vindicate every old wives' tale and urban legend ever uttered about hitchhiking.

I'd been told it was a creepy movie, and I was told correctly. It's quite creepy. So as to not give anything away, like the excessive bodycount (lots, but almost all of the violence is served offscreen), or the surprise ending (revenge is served), I'll just mention that it is crafted well enough, for what it is, and enjoyable enough, for what it is. It's not 'horror' (so I don't know where I thought I'd heard that), and it's not particularly deep, but it does lend me a tiny bit of perspective into Highwaymen, directed almost twenty years later by the same guy.

Let's hear it for Robert Harmon. C. Thomas Howell doesn't do too bad (he makes for a good everyman coming unhinged) but Robbie's really the star of the show. This time.

* In fact, by nature of being negative, I'm not happy. By definition, even.

Well, I haven't gotten any better at posting here in a timely fashion. For that, I blame society.

No, that's not enough. I blame nature. Something this summer, whether it be humidity or poison ivy, has left a small rash on my left wrist. To spare you any more nasty details (it gets itchy when it's sweaty) I'll just say that I've been wearing a pocketwatch for almost the last month. Naturally, this has improved my wrist immensely, but its effects have yet to be fully explored. No longer able to just glance at my wrist to see the local time in convenient digital form, I must now reach into my pocket, press a button, and do the mental tricks to change the hands to the time. This is, of course, a task that any third grader can do but darnit I'm not in third grade anymore.

I'm getting off track here.

I'd like to use my pocketwatching as an excuse for why these updates appear up to a week late. Can I? Only you can decide.

In an unrelated note, I scored big at the resale shop today. I tell Jessica (truthfully) that I don't like going there, but occasionally when I do I find something great (e.g. the monkey). Perhaps it is because I go less frequently... Anyway, this time I stumbled upon on of those classic LED watches that were so briefly popular about three decades ago. I have a couple (well, four if you count my Fossil 2002 knockoff) of them but none work well. I saw, for the pittance of two dollars, a bright shiny stainless steel one in the case today. Naturally I gambled, and six dollars of batteries later, it works! Not only does it tell the time (when the button is pushed) it also can tell the seconds, the date, and even the day of the week. This is the pinnacle of LED watch sophistication, I think. My Fossil doesn't even do the day of the week, after all!

I wasn't able to get a good shot of it showing the time, but I assure you it's quite readable indoors. I haven't tried it out in sunlight yet. Here, take a look.