Zeit. ZEIT!!! / VleeptronZ now has a clock! / Does your wristwatch cost $5000 ? You are certifiably insane. / the Old Royal Observatory @ Greenwich

Click images for larger,
and scroll down to see
the new VleeptronZ digital clock.

Okie Dokie, Bob, the Tek-Challenged Blogger, has added a nifty new DIGITAL CLOCK to VleeptronZ -- and Bob succeeded the very first time!

If you can't see it, scroll down a little, it will be on the right.

Blue is my favorite color.

It's set for EST (USA Eastern Standard Time), which is GMT (Greenwich Mean Time or Zulu Time) minus 5 hours.

If you're in Newfoundland or one of the time zones in India, you'll have to add a 30-minute offset to know what time it is. I've been to Newfoundland twice. Re-setting your watch by a 30-minute offset and then resetting it again when your ferry returns to the Canada mainland is One Royal Pain In The Ass.

Do you hate digital clocks and would prefer an Analog design? Leave a Comment.

I've forgotten to re-set my watch on two occasions when I've crossed a time zone. You should have seen the nasty looks on the faces of the crew of the ferry in Helsinki when my taxi ("taxi" and "okay" are the only Finnish/Suomi words I understand) dumped me at the gangway 0.003 seconds before the ship sailed. I learned the Finnish / Suomi words for "asshole tourist" that day.

The other time was last year when the Occidental Mystic Mathematician RamanuJohn picked me up at the ferry in Portland, Maine. The next morning I thought he was an hour late to wake up to drive me to the Amtrak train to Boston.

Ramanujan was not an hour late, he got me to the train in plenty of time. My watch was still telling Nova Scotia time. Doh.

I have one of those supernifty "Atomic Clocks" on my wall -- not a clock at all, but a radio that decodes the WWV government shortwave radio time signal, so not only is it accurate to about 1 second per millennium, but it also re-sets itself whenever (like 2 days ago) there's a Daylight Savings "Spring Forward / Fall Back" hour change. (There are several brands, mine is the Junghans MEGA.) When the clock re-sets the hour, or first acquires the radio signal, you should see the crazy dance the hands do to get to the perfect time!

They sell them as wristwatches, too, but how does that work? Does it also have a GPS so it knows which time zone your wrist is in? If you've tried an Atomic Wristwatch, please Leave A Comment.

My wristwatch is the Casio G-Shock, which I think went extinct several years ago. (Mine's not quite as fancy as the one in the image.) Last year I had to send it to the manufacturer to replace the battery, because the battery has to be replaced in a vacuum chamber because of the water-resistant sealed feature.

It's a wonderful wristwatch, all rubberized and muy butch to take a real traveller's beating, lots of features most of which I don't use -- but the best thing about the G-Shock is that if I lose it, I'm not bankrupted for thousands of dollars, I'm just heartbroken and out about $55. (I bought it at London's Liverpool Street Station while I waited for the train to Harwich, where you catch one of the two Channel ferries to the Netherlands.)

Anybody who wears a $5000 wristwratch is insane.

The teenage Todd or Scott or Mark who sells me submarine/torpedo/grinder sandwiches at d'Angelo's wears my same G-Shock watch. I hope he knows what a rare treasure he's got.

I visited the Old Royal Observatory at Greenwich, across the Thames from London, and they have an illuminated line in the pavement that marks The Prime Meridian -- Zero degrees East-West, "Where Time Begins." A class of elementary school kids skipped back and forth over the illuminated pavement line, jumping between the Eastern Hemisphere and the Western Hemisphere.

(So did I.)

At night they shine a laser light into the sky above the Thames Valley so you can see the Prime Meridian in the sky.

A whomp-ass red metal ball atop the Observatory's tower drops every day exactly at noon, so ships at anchor in the Thames can set their Harrison chronometers to the exact Greenwich time. This was the technology that allowed ships always to know their longitude wherever they sailed on Earth. (Latitude is an easy problem, longitude was a 50-aspirin headache that even Galileo and Newton couldn't solve. It was solved by a self-taught clockmaker names John Harrison [1693 - 1776].)

The Old Royal Observatory was designed by the architect Christopher Wren, and from its hilltop you can look down to the Thamees bank and see the sublime, ethereal Queen's House by Britain's other great architect Inigo Jones. The whole neighborhood is Architecture Heaven.

On my first trip to Europe I took a train from Amsterdam to Prague. In the middle of the night somewhere in Deutschland, I was standing in the train corridor to stretch my legs and a young woman, a little light on the Social Graces, said

"Zeit."

to me. I looked confused, so she yelled it louder.

"ZEIT!"

I still looked confused, so she grabbed my arm and looked at my G-Shock watch. Then she gave me my arm back. That's how I learned the German word for Time.