Mister B gave up his reserved spot on my lap when his hips began to trouble him. You see, in order to get there (if you’re a small dog, that is) you have to climb a ramp to the couch, get up on the arm of the couch, then make a little leap to the arm of my recliner and thence my lap. These days, he plops into one of his doggie beds instead, either the one in the family room or the one in our home office, whichever space I’m currently occupying. No climbing or leaping required. At least he’s still always nearby. Happily, Fritzi and Lulu have laid claim to my lap, so I stay nice and warm when I’m reading or watching TV.
Donna sent gifts to a sister yesterday, this time via UPS. Meanwhile, I’ve written our annual holiday update to family and friends and am trying to decide who’ll get it by post and who electronically. One year, about a decade back, I tried sending our Christmas letter out by email. Results were mixed. Elderly family members who had email addresses deleted it unread, thinking it was spam, and more than a dozen friends had changed email addresses and forgotten to let us know. Over the following week my inbox was full of failed delivery notices and we wound up having to address and mail physical letters anyway.
Email today is a more viable alternative to snail mail, so we’re going electronic again this year (with a few exceptions). Honestly, our primary motivation is to save on postage, which has increased dramatically. More and more of the folks who send us holiday greetings are doing the same. And there’s one great advantage to email: it’s easy and inexpensive to attach photos, and Donna and I have a nice one of the two of us we’d like to share before age turns us irredeemably unphotogenic.
Yesterday I wore one of my homage wristwatches. An homage (a homage/an homage: depends on whether you pronounce the “h,” which I don’t) watch emulates a more famous or expensive watch, but without crossing the line into outright fakery. If a watch wears a Rolex label but isn’t really a Rolex, it’s a fake. If a watch looks like a Rolex but has a different logo on the dial, it’s an homage.
In this case, it’s a Chinese Pagani Design diving watch based on the Swiss Tudor Black Bay 58. The PD sells for less than a hundred; the Tudor for almost four thousand. Like the Tudor, the PD has a waterproof steel case and bracelet, an automatic self-winding movement, plenty of luminosity for the dark, and a sapphire crystal. I haven’t had a Tudor on my wrist, but I’m willing to bet it doesn’t feel any more luxurious, or keep better time, than my knockoff.
My watch is on the left; the real thing on the right:
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Yeah, I said knockoff. Watch nerds, especially those who wear homages, tend to mince words. But my Chinese watch looks so much like the Swiss watch it’s modeled after, it’s almost a knockoff, *this* close to being an outright fake. What makes it okay, at least in my book, is that it doesn’t say “Tudor” on the dial. I would love to own a Tudor, but where am I gonna get four grand to spend on a watch? For less than a hundred bucks a pop, I’ll wear homages any day, and proudly.
Actually, these Chinese homages, at least the ones I own, are good quality timepieces. Since they have Japanese Seiko movements inside, they hold up with the more expensive watches in my collection, and in some cases, like this one, are even better. So far I have four homage watches: one designed after a Rolex, this one after the Tudor, and two based on Omegas. I have another Rolex homage on order and hope to get it by Christmas.
Not much to say about the latest school shooting. Nobody’s going to do anything about it anyway, especially now we’re in for another four years of you-know-who. I’m a little surprised it was a girl, but it had to happen eventually. Way things are looking now, if Trump decides to make the problem go away by demanding the media quit reporting on it, they’ll probably buckle and yesterday’s shooting in Wisconsin will be the last one we hear about. Think I’m being paranoid? Wait and see, cheese bags.
Drones, on the other hand? Apparently unknown persons have been flying drones over important military bases, presumably for photos and mapping. I don’t know if the operators are freelancing or working for government or commercial entities, but assume they’re doing it for money somehow. Going back a few years, the widely-reported UFOs seen by fighter pilots in military restricted airspace off the East Coast appear to have been small balloons, drifting on the wind, and I’ll assume for now those carried photographic or electronic surveillance devices too, and were launched for the purpose of gathering intelligence on military aircraft and tactics. These are doable things, and there are plenty of governments and businesses with the capability to do them. They’re also things that have actually happened.
Unlike most of the “drones” being reported in the skies above New Jersey and now other alien-abductee-wannabe true believer hotspots around the country, which are, from photos and videos I’ve seen, just plane old planes, complete with flashing anti-collision beacons, bright landing lights, and red and green wingtip lights. Most appear to be airliners stacked in holding near major airports; some appear to be police helicopters hovering or moving slowly; a few may in fact be civilian drones operated by kids trying to freak out their neighbors and get in on the action.
Everybody wants to believe. I do too. But I’ve scrambled on a UFO in the buffer zone between then-West and East Germany (whatever it was … probably a Cessna with its transponder turned off … was gone by the time I got there), and not many people can say that. I’ve been closer to Area 51, on the ground and in the air, than 99.9% of the population. I have hundreds of hours of night flying in my logbook. All that and I’ve never seen anything I didn’t know what it was.
It’s a crock, all of it. Settle down, all right?