12:00! 12:00!

For much of at least a decade, I've teased the grown-ups in charge of where I work about the easiest way to spot the generational divide between their staff who are teachers and those teachers' students is to do a quick survey of wrists for the presence and absence of watches.

In my experience, huge numbers of folks (this is a WAG) under the age of thirty-five don't wear a wristwatch (sorry, apple) because they use the display on their cellphones to tell them what time it is.

When I was a wee slip of a lad with most doorknobs still taller than my head, living in Belford, New Jersey, my Mom's sister, Ann, used to crack her up comparing how her daughters and I told time back in the days when we rode dinosaurs to kindergarten.

It was funny to the two sisters because their children all learned to tell time by calling out the position of the hands on the clocks in the living room using the channels of the television shows they watched. Heck, it made sense to us. 

My cousin Donna might say 'the little hand is on the Terrytoon Circus channel and the big hand is on the Captain Kangaroo station." Her mom would need to know the former was channel nine and the latter was channel three. In other words, it was a quarter after nine, easy-peasy.

Fast forward a generation to where those kids had their own kids and having pride of place in most of our living rooms was a video tape recorder an/or (later) DVR with a large you-can-see-it-across-the room clock display. You knew there had been a power outage if, when you came home, the device was flashing 12:00, a sort of electronic version of Help! 

So ubiquitously universal is/was the flashing 12:00 that, when they saw it, our children almost instinctively knew something was wrong (Timmy was still in the wheel because Lassie couldn't read numbers, I guess). Time, no matter how you tell it, marches on.

And now, according to various press reports (Real news, not the Mango Mussolin's fake news), it has come to this. I was thinking about a Chicago tune I am inordinately fond of but then also realized "I might get burned up by the sun, but I had my fun." Sunscreen uber alles.  
-bill kenny