Do You Have the Time?: Tuesday Open Thread

My name is Rev, and I am the white middle aged male version of a Basic Bitch.

I read books about the Napoleonic Wars in my recliner with a glass of scotch.

I love football despite all the intellectual reasons why it’s silly to root for a bunch of highly-paid strangers ostensibly representing a city I haven’t lived in for 30+ years.

I work in an office with hundreds of other drones, wearing a polo and khakis.

I drive a Honda.

And I collect mechanical watches because I am fascinated by their precision and complexity, even though their bare function (telling you that you are late for something) is objectively better accomplished by other means (quartz watch, cell phone, annoyed spouse).

It’s Mid Summer again, and because laughing at the Boston Red Sox for their remarkable personnel incompetence only carries us so far, Imma use this space to subject you to My Interests. And because I am writing this column:

So: mechanical watches. They are silly. They are too expensive for what they do.Too many people use them as status symbols instead of objects that provide them any internal satisfaction. Too many people use watch snobbery as just another avenue to prove how smart or obsessive they can be in a niche subject.

In short, being a mechanical watch fan is like being a Giants fan: you may be very genuine, but be prepared to deal with a bunch of poseurs, assholes and outright freaks.

But they represent aspects of human ingenuity that are often lost on us (“us” in this case meaning Americans and most Canadians): precision and delicacy. It takes dozens to hundreds of parts to mechanically keep time, and the tolerances must be incredibly tight to keep that time with any sort of accuracy.

Now you have to take all that care and effort and shrink it down to a roughly one-inch package.

Now make it rugged enough to sustain the thousand large and small shocks, knocks and whacks inherent in being attached to a human limb WHILE STILL BEING ACCURATE.

Fucking marvels, these little beauties.

If you want an incredible interactive explanation of how they work, building up from first principles, check this out.

NEXT WEEK: Types of watches and some starter suggestions.

NFL: Nothing. Literally, lead story is the KC mascot retiring after 35 years. That bad.

RANDOM RANKINGS: STAR TREK MOVIES

1. Wrath of Khan
2. Voyage Home
3. First Contact
4. NüTrek
5. Search for Spock
6. Motion Picture
7. Insurrection
8. Into Darkness
9. Beyond
10. Generations
11. Nemesis
12. The One With God