Prepare for a long hike, then go outside at exactly noon. Check that the sun is directly over head, and check that your watch says 12:00. Now, walk east or west. You don’t have to be in a rush. In fact, take your time.

Now, say it takes you a year to walk from Virginia to Illinois. At the end of that year, your watch and the sun will not be in sync. When the sun is directly over head, like when you started your trip at noon, your watch now says 11:00a.m.

Say it takes you another year to reach Colorado, and then another year to reach California. When the sun is directly over your head in California, your watch would say 9:00 a.m. This seems like standard time zone knowledge, but really, it isn’t.

If every day of your year-long walk, you looked up at the noon sun, when did your watch start being wrong? It wouldn’t suddenly jump when you crossed the invisible time zone “border.” It would slowly happen over all the 365 days. One day your watch and the sun would be one minute apart, then another day two minutes apart, then eventually 60 minutes apart, then 61 minutes, then 120 minutes, and so on. But at no point during the long walk would you feel the difference in time. It’s not like a plane flight where you go from one time zone to another quickly.

You look up at the sun one day, and then 24 hours later you look up at it again. Do this many times and eventually there’s a difference — but 24 hours is 24 hours, yes? If you judge the 24 hours by the sun reaching noon, your watch must have changed. If you judge the 24 hours by your watch, the sun’s pattern must have changed? At no one point during the long walk did the “flow of time” seem to change, but yet you have hard evidence that it did change.

I fully understand the physics and mathematics of the situation. But the reality of a watch and the sun falling out of sync for showing 24 hours twists my little brain in a way I can’t grasp. This has never bothered me when I’ve flown across the country, in either direction, but thinking about the long walk change just flabbergasts me.

Maybe I’m just too simple. Or maybe . . . oh, look, something shiny.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com

I “discovered” something the other day that made me stop and think. Smokey and the Bandit and Star Wars came out in the same year — 1977. I love Smokey and the Bandit; I’ve seen it probably half a dozen times. I used to could quote dialog from it almost as well as I could Star Wars lines. Let’s see. . .

“What’s the —damn Germans got to do with it?”

“What we got to do, kidnap the pope?”

“I’m gonna need a fast car. Faster than that.”

“That was an attention getter.”

“I take my hat off for one thing, and one thing only.”

“Hold on to your head, Fred.”

“She was wearin’ a wedding dress.” “What’s she wearin’ now?”

. . . that’s all off the top of my head.

I was 10 years old in 1977 but I remember seeing SatB in the theater just like I remember seeing SW in the theater. SatB was a cultural hit, spawning at least 2 sequel movies, at least 1 other similar-themed movie (Convoy), and at least 1 similar-themed TV show (BJ and the Bear). But the CB/trucker craze fizzled out by the 80s.

SW, on the other hand, became a cultural phenomenon that has lasted 30 years so far, spawning uncountably numerous similar media. When I think of SW, I think of it as more of an event than as a simple movie. But really, it was just a movie, just like SatB. I don’t know the exact dates they were released, but it’s quite possible that I might have seen them one week after the other.

They are such completely different pieces of entertainment, it’s hard to think of them as from the same time period and culture. I mean, if you showed these two movies to someone who knew nothing about them, would they believe they came out in the same year, in the same country?

This idea just came to me: Can we map the characters from Smokey and the Bandit with the characters from Star Wars?

Bandit = Luke Skywalker
Snowman = Han Solo
Fred = Chewbacca
Frog = Princess Leia
? = Ben Kenobi

Sheriff Buford T. Justice = Darth Vader
Junior Justice = ?
? = Grand Moff Tarkin

Big Enos = ?
Little Enos = ?

Hmm. Needs a little more thought to make it all work.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com

Cowgrit loves craigslist.com. We’ll have an old piece of furniture or something to get rid of, and instead of me having to take it to Goodwill or the dump, Cowgrit will put it on craigslist and actually find someone who’ll come get it and give us cash for the privilege. It only takes a couple days, and poof, whatever it is is gone and out of our way.

We had an old bedside table from our boys’ room that no longer fit or matched their other furniture. The table sat in my office for several months — it was out of the way, and out of mind. But Cowgrit eventually got around to listing it on craigslist. It sold within 48 hours. The guy came and picked it up and gave Cowgrit money. Wonderful.

But Calfgrit7 was unhappy with that transaction. He “loved” that table, he said. Never mind that it was shoved in a corner of my office for months, and he had never said anything about in all that time (or before). He was upset that Cowgrit sold it.

Later, Cowgrit found a piece of notebook paper with the words, “For Sale” written big, lying on our bedroom dresser. CG7 had decided to, in turn, sell her “favorite furniture.” Fortunately he doesn’t know how to list anything on craigslist.

Bullgrit
bullgrit@totalbullgrit.com