House of Eratosthenes

Silly people over at Slate (WARNING: Article is technical/retail, and dated by nearly four years). When are they gonna learn a preposition is not something you want to end a sentence with?

Interesting items be here. Could be worth your time even in spite of all that dust on top. It’s worth mine, because the lady and I both had the same thought this morning: Gotta get a new alarm clock.

So I’m out the door. Probably gonna buy two of something. Yeah that’s right; a female, inexplicably, has entrusted me with the power to determine how she is going to wake up for the next n years. And I, inexplicably, have accepted this and the responsibility that goes with it. Mmmmm, hmmmm……..this should go rather well. Can’t see a downside to it at all.

It takes brave, brave lads like me, to keep the world goin’ round.

[Morgan comes home with the Dewalt Star Trek Transporter Light & Sound Alarm Clock. That lays your clothes out for you. And brews your coffee.]

It may surprise you, but I have this puppy.

I have one of the triangular ones. I thought it would be more aesthetically pleasing to the eye, and I have a thing for analog clocks.

However, if I had it to do again I think I’d get the digital one for two reasons. One … more functions, not the least of which is multiple alarms. The other — size. The lamp table on my side of the bed is pretty small, and the footprint of this thing …. well, it takes up a lot of the visual space over there … and you can’t see the bloody thing at night anyway. We have another, digital clock in the room on the wife’s side if we just gotta know what time it is in the middle of the night.

I like it. After years of waking up to NPR after we first got married, at some point I got tired of waking up to how many Tutsis or Hutus bodies were floating down the river the previous day. Plus about that time I think the Bosnia thing was going on, too. Not that we don’t need to know about these things, but I decided that we didn’t need to have them be our first waking thoughts of the day.

So we switched to the Oldies. We like Oldies. But commercial radio … it turns me off. Especially in the morning. Ad after ad after ad just blends into a stream of “blah” and it makes me want to crush the thing. I don’t want to wake up to that, either.

So I got the Zen Alarm Clock. Off of Ebay. I think I “only” paid about $70 for it. Now, in the morning I get a pleasant “ding!”. No dead Tutsis or Bosnians or people trying to sell me Geritol or whatever. 4 minutes later I get another “ding!”. They slowly get closer and closer together. Point is, you wake up slowly to a chime.

Maybe it’s left over from my Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Alan Watts-reading days. Got some good perspective from all that — most surprisingly from Watts — because I’ suspect most of his readers are/were hippy-dippy new-agey airheads. This is why in my “Zen” days I stayed away from Zen Centers and …. “Organized Zen”. I knew what sorts I’d run in to, and besides, I also knew that “Organized Zen” would pretty much be a self-contradiction. But I digress.

It’s a cool way to wake up, and one of my friends recently showed me her digital one. Ok, that could be taken wrong. 😉 How about our good friends recently showed us their digital one. [now everyone envisions ‘swingers’ … good grief!!! Can’t win. Stop digging! :-P]

I’m considering getting one.
- philmon | 01/30/2010 @ 21:09
Get a dog.

Those hairy fuckers will wake you up on the dot every single morning of your life.
- Daphne | 01/31/2010 @ 17:11
*lol* Daphne,

What? You don’t like to be woken up with a 60 lb pile of wet slobbery fur jumping on your bed to give you kisses?

I cannot imagine why anybody wouldn’t enjoy that! And no, I’ve not lived with a dog in 20 years. Why do you ask?
- pdwalker | 02/02/2010 @ 01:44

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Ten Best Alarm Clocks Up By Which To WakeSaturday, January 30th, 2010

Ten Best Alarm Clocks Up By Which To Wake
Saturday, January 30th, 2010