Snoopywatch

A barren blipday today. I took a taxi to work this morning, not out of laziness or decadence (though either of those would have been a perfectly good reason as far as I'm concerned) but because I had a stack of files from last week's trip down south, too many files to carry on foot. So no blips on the way to the office.

Lunchtime was no better. We had a lunchtime talk, so my lunchbreak lasted about 10 minutes. No time for blipping.

So I have blipped a watch. I don't have a macro lens, so this is a crop from as close as I could get with my 50mm. And so it breaks my "no cropping" rule. Oh well. I suppose rules are there to be broken.

I have a thing about watches. Proper, old-fashioned mechanical watches. I find them wonderful and fascinating and they give me a way of expressing my little streak of fogeyism with minimal inconvenience (and maximal exoense...). They are also ridiculously elaborate machines for time-keeping in the 21st century and this appeals to my sense of the ridiculous :-) I have a small collection (small in the context of watch-collectors, but probably large in the context of ordinary, sensible people). They will no doubt appear one by one on slow blipdays like today.

The watch above is an Omega Speedmaster Professional which, as Omega's marketing department will gladly remind you, was the first watch to be worn on the moon. Of course, the watch you see above is not the actual first watch to be worn on the moon - that was "lost" in transit between Buzz Aldrin and the Smithsonian. More trivia: Neil Armstrong didn't wear a watch when he took his first walk on the moon, hence Buzz Aldrin was the first man to wear a watch on the moon. To be more specific about the watch pictured above is a limited edition to commemorate the fact that it received the Snoopy Award. It may not be possible to make it out on the picture, but the blue subdial to the left contains a representation of Snoopy in a space suit.

Yet more trivia - that photograph was not taken at 9 minutes past 10. It is a convention amongst watch-photographers that the hands are usually set at roughly 10 past 10 or 10 to 2: this makes the watch smile :-)

If you have followed my ramblings this far, all I can say is that you should have something more useful to do :-) Wishing everyone a good evening!