Sunday, April 03, 2016

the clock with the continuous motion

hey there


i appreciate that it is the case of every post i do like this, look you see, sees this blog edge ever further into the territory of being a digital variation of the deranged diaries off of John Doe in the film Se7en. what can i say, some things are just meant to be.

yesterday, then, which is to say the day before today, i bought a new clock. i am keen to stress the "l" in that word, dear reader, for fear that Spiros will get all excited and believe this post is something which it is not.

for what reason did i purchase a new clock for the wall? well, we didn't actually have one on the go, and William asked for one. he's presently learning the magic of telling time at school, and asked if we could have one so that he may practice. this is as good a reason as any, and so i got a rather smart one off of Yorkshire Trading for £5, or if you like to be pedantic £4.99, which is only just slightly south of £5.



what's the most exciting part about the new clock? well, other than the title suggestion, it's that i put a nail in the wall to hang it on without striking a water pipe or a leccy cable. that's a rarity for me. granted, yes, i did just put the nail at a point which suggested there had been one before, but still.

other than that triumph, the exciting thing, and the thing i did not know about when i bought it, is that the second hand has a continuous motion to it. that means it more or less keeps moving, rather than doing that "stutter click" which second hands are often known to do.

here, i've tried to capture some of it through the medium of Camcorder mode, but it might be the case that Camcorder mode undermines the depiction of the continuous motion.



is there anything interesting that i can tell you about the continuous motion of a second hand on a clock? yes. i believe this holds true, some knowledge or information that i got years ago and have for some reason always remembered is that the second hand is one of the easiest and most obvious ways to spot a fake Rolex. there are other means to spot one - with a plastic strap generally being accepted as one - but if you see a Rolex and it doesn't have a very fluid, constant motion second hand, then it's a fake. the perfection which Rolex have in place for the movement of the second hand is where an awful lot of the money that the watches cost goes, and so it's an area that bootleggers seldom ever try to replicate.

has that information ever been of use or value to me? yes, but mostly as a theoretical thing. i know some believe my life to be a constant stream of either buying or inspecting Rolex watches, but this is not the case, alas.

this clock does not have the fluid movement to the second hand as one would find in a Rolex, but it is all the better for that being the case, i reckon. it most decidedly is in terms of costs.



am i being correct in referring to this movement as continuous rather than perpetual? yes. whereas the syllables and alliteration of "perpetual" sounds better from a marketing perspective, the term itself suggests never ending. it's not wrong to suggest that the term perpetual could be used for the movement of the second hand, but it's only really correct if you are happy to accept that everything on the planet is in fact perpetual right up to the moment at which it stops. ostensibly, i suppose, continuous could be charged with the same sort of conditional definition, but it does lack the tacit implication of the infinite. or something like that.

anyway, i am going to go and have a look at the clock some more, marvelling at the second hand and taking certain pride in the lovely job what i did with the nail to hang it upon.



be excellent to each other!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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