Life & Naansense

Pizzas or Hotdogs? Oh and how about Clocks, too?

“I’m sitting here in the (suddenly) boring room
it’s just another rainy Sunday afternoon evening.
I’m wasting tumbling my time
I got (almosully*) nothing to do
I’m lazying around
I’m waiting for Tues(day)
I look at the clock and i wonder..” 

If you haven’t figured out still, I’m inanely bored. The play i had with paints today, is drying and needs to be ignored or run the risk of getting spoilt. A movie has been watched. Books have been read. Online reads dusted too. India v/s Pak match tweets endured. Food relished. Music absorbed. Sarcasm exercised.
And just when i couldn’t figure anything more to do on this dreadful, dying Sunday evening, i saw an image of a clock online somewhere and i thought,

“Hey, why are clocks always round?”

Now before you begin to question my state of mind and/or my knowledge on history of time-keeping of mankind, please tolerate a few more lines and (perhaps) you shall see, too. So, why are clocks round? And why do those needles, everywhere, have to go ‘clockwise’ only - why isn’t anticlockwise, the clockwise? Some of the top-of-the-mind reasons:

1. The earth rotates around the sun elliptically (almost round)
2. Our first time-keeping was through sun dials. Again, round. Or at least the shadow bit of it.
3. Pizzas are round. That doesn’t count? Okay.
4. Most of us run in circles our entire lives. Err.. next!
5. Clocks were adapted from Sundials, which were in turn invented in the Northern hemisphere. The shadow on a sundial in this part of the world moves in a ‘clockwise’ direction and hence. Sorry southerners, just wasn’t your time, eh?

That’s many a reasons, you’d say. But all those are rooted in a time which no living human today even remembers. So we can do away with this roundness (or since some decades now, squareness)?? Aren’t ye all just fed up with this worldwide consistency?

Well i am and that’s all i care about. Yes, this is the selfish me and if you don’t like it you can go back to running in your circles. *smug look*
I did a bit of googling (it’s time that all spell-checkers recognize this as a word now. Period.) and it turns out that i aint the only fed up one. I’ve given below the various designs i came across, including an ancient looking one and one which ain’t actually a clock but more like a reminder device but hinges on the same idea. And why should we go in for these clocks - a quick line up:

1. It’s a change and change is almosully* for good.
2. You can’t eat Pizza daily. Hotdogs are great too. Oh c’mon, this ought to be counted!
3. I like them. That’s right.
4. Poor kids in school wouldn’t struggle to draw that perfect circle with perfectly placed numbers. Just draw a line and hey presto! At least i got the kids’ votes on my side.
5. Linear clocks take up lesser space too and we all know how crowded Earth is these days. Extra points, yeah! And minimalists love this, so more votes. Yay!
6. Clockwise and anticlockwise will be replaced with left and right. So much easier. And shorter to write/type. Energy savings! And now the environmentalists, too, are in my pocket.
7. Seven is a lucky number and i’d like to rest my case here. 

And since I was as bored as aforementioned, i drew a basic version of my own linear clock too (the one in the end, if it isn’t obvious). (The idea of googling for similar clocks dawned me on after i’d designed it and now my ego doesn’t allow me to not display my effort. There! Now i can sleep peacefully tonight.)

Face it - a ‘linear time’ sounds more encouraging than a circular one, right? The latter makes me pukish with all that circular motion.

*Almosully - something that lies between almost and fully. A word me and a twitter friend, Kushagra, have come up with. You can clap.
Oh and the spoofed song lyrics in the beginning are from a song called “Lemon Tree” by Fool’s Garden.