It's time. But what does that mean?

 Time is relative. My buddy Sal understood that...  

 

Time is relative to only one thing - the earth's rotation around the sun. Nothing more. Clocks and calendars are nothing more than registers. 'Lengths of time' are irrelevant. The only reason that we 'mark time' or 'do time' is so we'll know when things are supposed to start or end. We like to think we 'keep time' but that's a misnomer. Time is fleeting. We can't keep it at all. The best we can hope for is to use the time we have as productively and respectfully as we can, and that's all I have to say about that.

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Ya know, all that mishegoss about it snowing on Christmas Eve and sleigh rides with the sleigh bells jingling and stockings hung by fireplaces and the rest of that 'Christmas in New England' or whatever winter shit they might wanna conjur around the day is totally wasted on me. I love Christmas in Florida. It's usually around 75 degrees on Christmas Day. Juss' sayin'...

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Check out the cuffs...

 

Time is also relative. This picture was taken of me and my 

senior Prom date 51 years ago. So why does it feel as if 

it was just a couple of weeks ago?

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Time is also relative to time itself.

 Case in point?

 

Everybody knows that there are 24 hours in a day, 60 minutes in an hour, and 60 seconds in minute. But in 1793, the French smashed the old clock system in favor of French Revolutionary Time, which was a 10-hour day, with 100 minutes per hour, and 100 seconds per minute. 

This 'thoroughly modern system' (another way of measuring time) had a few practical benefits, chief among them being a simplified way to do time-related math. If we want to know when a day is 80% complete, decimal time simply says "at the end of the eighth hour," whereas standard time requires us to say "at 19 hours, 12 minutes." 

French Revolutionary Time was a more elegant solution to that math problem. The problem was that every living person already had a well-established way of telling the time, and old habits die hard.
 

 

French Revolutionary Time officially began on November 24, 1793 although conceptual work around the system had been going on since the 1750s. The French manufactured clocks and watches showing both decimal time and standard time on their faces (allowing for both conversion and confusion). These clock faces were spectacularly weird.

 

The system proved unpopular. People were unfamiliar with switching systems of time, and there were few practical reasons for non-mathematicians to change how they told time. (The same could not be said of the metric system of weights and measurements, which helped to standardize commerce; weights and measurements often differed in neighboring countries, but clocks generally did not.) Furthermore, replacing every clock and watch in the country was an expensive proposition. The French officially stopped using decimal time after just 17 months. French Revolutionary Time became non-mandatory starting on April 7, 1795. This didn't stop some areas of the country from continuing to observe decimal time, and a few decimal clocks remained in use for years afterwards, presumably leading to many missed appointments!
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Does someone you know deserve

something a little 'special' this year?

You still have time to get it by Christmas...

Click on the picture for information on this beautiful handmade bracelet. 

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or your girlfriend right here: 

https://www.etsy.com/shop/BjacksonJewelry

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The short version for the Sullivan show.

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