Nows and Forevers

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/09/fashion/watches-manual-wind-oris.html

The New York Times is telling me today that old-style timepieces are back in fashion.

It’s been a long time since I have worn a watch — I think the last time was the early ‘90s when I was trying to be polite to my grandparents, who bought me a watch for Christmas — although from time to time I’ve experimented with sports watches to time my running. And for a bit, I wore a FitBit, although that was doomed from the start.

You see a lot of watches these days, but they’re all Apple Watches. I know a few people who wear them. I never have had the urge, because A, I don’t like wearing something on my wrist and B, I have always found another way of telling the time.

It’s funny, though, someone whose career depends on deadlines, and who lives by at least two every day, not wearing a watch. Well, it’s been easier in the smartphone and cell phone era. But even before that, I found other ways.

The last watch I had was a manual timepiece, but it still had a battery. The one I had before that, when I was a kid in the ‘80s, was manual and you did have to wind it. I remember not quite understanding at first why my watch, which also was a Christmas present (see a theme?), stopped working.

You have to wind it up every once in a while, my grandfather told me. He wore a watch his entire life.

I guess for some reason I thought watches just worked, like Foucault’s Pendulum, tied to the rhythm of the days and nights and the moon or something. Science has never been one of my strong suits.

The Times’ article says that people are going back to the manual-winding watch because “people are feeling overwhelmed and want to hit pause on pretty much everything,” including anything digital.

That’s probably true. I sure have tried to spend less time in the digital world in my personal life, whether it’s writing more by hand or going off social media or reading a physical book instead of a Kindle.

The co-CEO of a watch company, Oris, told the Times that winding a watch is “a moment of contemplation, a moment to take for yourself.” I think that’s probably true, although I remember winding a watch and pretty much wondering if I was getting it right. That must have just been the impatience of a teenager.

Of course, this desire for contemplation and thinking about your life in the moment seems to come at a cost. The watches mentioned in the article cost between $4,400 and $12,300, which is way more than I can afford for a watch, unless it will somehow take me back in time. If that’s the case, then it’s definitely in my budget.

Other than that, I’ll find the time the old-fashioned way: Looking at my iPhone.

It’s getting dark enough that the lights are on for the baseball game I am at tonight. And it’s still 90 degrees.

Very little cooling at all.

I shouldn’t complain. There are plenty of people who have it worse than me. It has only been one day of 90+. I can’t imagine what it’s like in Phoenix or Houston or the many other places where the heat is unbearable, or worse.

About an hour into my workday, I got a Tweetdeck notice for the first time:

Unlock more posts by subscribing.

And:

You have reached the limit for seeing posts today. Subscribe to see more posts every day.

Just another new Twitter experience. Everything on my Tweetdeck columns went blank, also the first time that’s happened. I went back an hour later and the same thing happened.

I don’t post on Twitter anymore, but I do keep it going for work. A journalist should keep as many streams as possible open, no matter how painful that can be sometimes. But until today, I never got this notice.

It’s been a long time (since April) that I posted anything on social media other than LinkedIn. I don’t have social media on my iPhone either, and I don’t scroll when I’m home. Tweetdeck in the hours I’m in front of my computer at work was the last vestige of my one-time social media fixation.

Looks like that’s going away, too. Because I’m not going to subscribe.

I’ve been a vegetarian on and off for the past 37 years. Mostly on, but recently off. But I’m still bemused by the fact that fast-food restaurants, after years of ignoring vegetarians, are still trying to find the magic key to cater to them.

The latest is Burger King, which in Asia launched what it calls the Real Cheeseburger: 20 slices of American cheese with sesame-seed buns on either side. Probably no chance of it coming to the United States, thankfully.

I’m old enough to remember when the best vegetarians could do at a fast-food restaurant was order a McDonald’s or Burger King cheeseburger and wonder whether the server would understand.

Usually, it would go like this:

“I”d like a cheeseburger, without the meat, please,” I’d say.

“A what,” would be the response 99 times out of 100. “Without the meat?”

Then they’d be a silence and sometimes a flurry at the register, as the server would ask someone else if A, this customer wasn’t full of [REDACTED] or B, how to ring it up.

Now it’s different. McDonald’s doesn’t really have a solid vegetarian option, although it has tested them. Burger King has the Impossible Burger, which isn’t bad but if you care about being a vegetarian, you gotta wonder whether it’s being grilled the same place as the meat.

Which of course, it probably is.

Another two days of smoke from Canadian wildfires have wafted over where I live, enough to give me more bouts of coughing.

Thanks, Canada!

Thankfully, it’s gonna now, or will be mostly gone this week. These fires are in the Canadian west, not the ones from Ontario and Quebec that made June and early July miserable. But these fires are apparently going to come and go the rest of the summer and fall, since there’s apparently no way to fight them all.

I never thought I’d live to see the day that The New York Times would jettison its sports department.

Yet that’s what it will do, instead leaning on its recently acquired digital sports platform, The Athletic, and shifting the 35 or so reporters and editors on the Times sports desk to other jobs.

It’s running because of what the Times sports department has done in its long history. Some of journalism’s most famous names have gone through there, including Red Smith, George Vescey and Robert Lipsyte. I’m not really a sports fan, but The Times’ sports section was always worth looking at.

At the same time, though, things have been changing in journalism overall and at The Times. Gone are box scores, the standalone section, and a dedicated reporter to each team, what we call a beat reporter. Those moves would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. It now seems wise, for journalism is not what it used to be.

The Athletic is taking the lead role in sports coverage for The Times and its website. It’s had challenges of its own — including not making any money and recently laying off staff — but by the way, I’ve been a subscriber of both The Times and The Athletic. Both are great.

I’m sure this is not the only dramatic change at The Times, which is the one newspaper I’ve read all my life and that I subscribe to along with The Washington Post. But it’s also surprising, how things have shaken out, for I kinda thought that The Times was relatively immune to the changes in media, at least in terms of economics, being one of the only media outlets (The Wall Street Journal is another) that has made the transition to digital somewhat well.

I gotta wonder, what’s the next shoe to drop?