Archie Kobain

Well, I’m not exactly dead meat, but I’m close…

Upon returning from Bonnaroo, a terrible illness has befallen upon the Kobain household. At first, I thought it was just my body trying to purge all of the Tennessee dust that I absorbed at the four day music festival this year. No such luck… I’ve been sick in bed for the last two days.  Can’t really see the computer screen, and I keep dozing off and having very weird, hallucinogenic, Nyquil induced dreams…

Old lady on a bus bench yelling, “this is dangerous”.

Aquarium filled with purple fish, swimming in purple water.

Nuns with briefcases, racing across a busy highway.

 …yep, I’ve seen them all.

I hate to say it but… 

I’m sorry. I can’t come to the door right now. I’m afraid that in my weakened condition, I could take a nasty spill down the stairs and subject myself to further school absences. You can reach my parents at their places of business. Thank you for stopping by. I appreciate your concern for my well-being.
Have a nice day! 

I don’t know how I’m ever going to get to all the stories that I have to tell. Funny, today, I can’t even think of any of them, I just keep thinking about…

Clocks
Clocks, watches, analog or digital – it’s the one universal thing that you can trust. You can walk right up to a perfect stranger in Central Park and say, “excuse me, do you have the time?”  He tells you and you trust him.  And his answer was probably close enough to accurate. Just imagine going up to that same person and asking, “excuse me, is there one true God?”

How can this be?  We can’t get people to agree on almost anything. Yet, we can all agree on what time it is right now.  Even crazier, there are clock manufacturers and watch makers around the globe, who also agree on the speed of time and make every clock and watch keep time at exactly the same pace.

Uh… Damned nuns. Now they’re running across railroad tracks.

 Are you thinking about this?  A $10 Swatch and a $20K Rolex both keep time at the same pace. If you were off by even one second per hour, within a month you could be off by an hour…but that just doesn’t happen. Most clocks work just fine. I’m telling you, it’s the one universal agreement. One second is one second long…

You’re probably thinking, “what’s the big deal?  Time works. Get over it.”
Yes. But it’s my job to make you think about things you hadn’t thought of.

So read on, from WikiPedia, the source of all Internet knowledge:

Early definitions of the second were based on the apparent motion of the sun around the earth. The solar day was divided into 24 hours, each of which contained 60 minutes of 60 seconds each, so the second was ¹⁄_86 400 of the mean solar day. However, 19th- and 20th century astronomical observations revealed that this average time is lengthening, and thus the sun/earth motion is no longer considered a suitable basis for definition. With the advent of atomic clocks, it became feasible to define the second based on fundamental properties of nature. Since 1967, the second has been defined to be the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom.

 Go ahead. Talk amongst yourselves.

Now, I’m not sure what troubles me more…
The little old Swiss watchmaker, somewhere outside of Versoix, “I need me some caesuim-133 atoms so that I can count the radiaition periods!” Where does one get caesuim-133 atoms?  How do you count that fast?  “Damn, I lost count just past 8 million!”  – or – is anyone worried about the fact that solar day is lengthening? Doesn’t that mean that the Earth is slowing down?

There has to be deeper meaning to all of this.

I’d love to explore this farther but now there’s a train coming.
I have to try and get all these nuns off the tracks. 

See you next time.

– Arch