A Luddite and His Timex Watch - weekly column

Lawrence Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

Watch Out!

Some millionaire on the a.m. radio was pitying himself the other day: his expensive, high-tech, high-tone Fruit™ watch (or was it a vegetable watch?) wasn’t acting right, wouldn’t hold a charge, and had to be re-programmed every day until tech support (or Tech Support) worked their magic on it.

Mr. Millionaire, meet the $10 Timex. Oops - it’s up to $24 now. My Timex, which “takes a licking and keeps on ticking,” as John Cameron Swayze used to say, cost only $10 at Giganto-Mart, but that was years ago.

A Timex needs no programming; all you do is re-set it twice a year for the semi-annual fall-fully-forward-spring-latch-back-attack thing.

The basic Timex watch is soooooooooooooo uncool. A Timex will not impress your date. A Timex will not impress your beagle. A Timex is redolent of the pool room, not the board room. A discriminating mugger will sneer at a Timex with the same contempt he once demonstrated for the Ford Fiesta. A Timex does not speak of elegance, guess your height and weight, tell you the future, measure the deterioration of your liver, or calculate the decay of the planet’s orbit around the sun. All a Timex does is show you the time with two little pointers, also known as hands, although they aren’t really hands. We just call them hands, you see.

Clever people, those Chinese, to have invented such a cheap and reliable way of telling time. Not that time will listen to what you tell it.

A Timex comes in a variety of colors and straps, and some variations are named Expedition™ and Iron Man™ and such, plain little ol’ watches that have watched too many Rambo movies and have costumed themselves in dime-store camouflage and outfitted themselves with itty-bitty Russian Kalashnikovs.

When the battery in a Timex wears out, you can usually replace it yourself. Just unscrew the back, drop the battery, note the number, and go to the drug store for a replacement. This is needful only every two or three years, sometimes longer.

A watch should not need programming. Nor should a radio or a teevee set or a telephone, but the STEMinstas will not have it that when you buy something it should simply work. Oh, no; now you must read books and access sites and give strangers your credit card numbers and a snapshot of your passport in order to validate and start up a gadget for which you have already paid.

I suppose next we’ll have to program our pocket knives and fountain pens. A carpenter roofing in the hot sun might have to knock off work for an hour to access a spiderwebsite and purchase a yearly update for his hammer. Screwdrivers might need occasional re-programming. And don’t get me started on the complications of electronic 2 x 4s.

Young people might find adapting to a wristwatch of any kind a challenge. Instead of automatically reaching into a pocket or purse for the MePhone to check the time they would have to learn how to swing an arm out and up to read the little dial. And, yes, they’d have to figure out what “hands” are and how to work out the time from the hands’ positions.

But then, wearing a watch at all, even a Timex, might enhance a young man or woman’s coolness factor: “Hey, Heather-Misty-Dakota-Shane, what’s that neat-looking thing on your wrist? I’ve got to get me one!”

Well, as they say in that old movie in which James Arness plays a giant, carnivorous carrot, “Watch the skies!”

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Do Luddies Read?

Mack Hall, HSG
Mhall46184@aol.com

Do Luddites Read?

If in the past a tyrant wanted to eliminate a book not acceptable to his ego or his ideology he had to go to a great deal of bother to discredit books and their writers. Seizing and burning books meant organizing government or military departments to search out copies, although many university students were (and still are) eager to volunteer in ideological censorship.

With gadgetry our culture has progressed from burning books (which, after all, pollutes the air) to deleting books from the disinformation superhighway by clicking an app.

One of the early sellers of electronic books discovered that it was selling a book without the permission of the copyright owner. The book was not only withdrawn from sale, but all the copies already sold were made to disappear instantly from the little plastic boxes of all the people who had bought the book. The purchasers were given credit, and all was well except for this disturbing reality: any book, or even all of them, can be made to disappear from any electronic reader at any time.

Books on any sort of electronic device can be altered or deleted by someone else upon command. The book you begin to read can be changed before you finish it. Any titles you read can of course be monitored by anyone who is interested in knowing what you are up to.

And this is nothing new, except for improved efficiency in shoving unacceptable words down the Orwellian memory hole. In church, for example, some familiar hymns have been altered for contemporary sensitivities. Church committees and publishers have sometimes determined that our ancestors were wrong, and have then changed or eliminated words, phrases, and entire songs very dear to generations of worshippers.

Destroying art is an ISIS / Taliban thing, not our thing, even when prefaced with “as arranged by…”

However, the words in the printed hymnal do not change while you are holding the hymnal. Any printed book in your hands can be determined by you to be a bad book or a good book. But nothing about that physical book is going to change except for the inevitable decay of physical matter through fire, immersion in water, or the passage of years. The contents of an electronic edition, however, could be whatever the publisher or service provider wants them to be at any moment.

Resistance both to snooping and to changing words and songs and texts is not a matter of being a Luddite, but a reasonable desire that the editors and purveyors of those words and songs and texts remember that they are not Shakespeare, John Newton, or Lord Byron. Ms. Grundy and her doppelganger Josef Goebbels don’t rate a veto on art, music, and faith.

An electronic book is even more ephemeral than Radio Shack™. There is much to be said for – and by – that printed book on the shelf.

And, hey, Luddites – happy bicentennial!


Bloom, Allan. The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster. 1987.

Finn, Peter, and Petra Couvee’. The Zhivago Affair. New York: Pantheon Books. 2014.

Manning, Molly Guptill. When Books Went to War. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Pubishing Company. 2014.

Shirer, William L. The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. New York: Simon and Schuster. 1960.

Slonim, Mark. Soviet Russian Literature: Writers and Problems, 1917-1967. New York: Oxford University Press. 1967.

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