I raise these issues because, for a while now, there have been magazines available devoted to collectible watches, rather expensive magazines printed on shiny paper with full-color pages, and I wonder whether they are bought only by readers who leaf through them as though they were volumes of fairy tales, or whether the publications are addressed to a public of serious purchasers, as I sometimes suspect. This would mean that the more the mechanical watch, miracle of centuries of experience, becomes useless, the stronger and more widespread is the desire to display, to regard fondly, to cherish as an investment, these wondrous and perfect time machines.
It is obvious that these machines are not designed to communicate the fleeting hour. The abundance of functions and their elegant distribution over numerous and symmetrical dials mean that, to learn that it is twenty past three on Friday, May 24, you have to shift your eyes at some length, following the movement of numerous hands, as, in sequence, you record the information in a notebook. For that matter, the envious Japanese electronics experts, now ashamed of their former practicality, have come out with promises of microscopic dials that will display barometric pressure, altitude, ocean depth, countdown timing, and temperature, not to mention, of course, data bank, telemetric time indicator, eight alarms, money-changing calculator, and hour signal.
All these clocks, like the whole information industry today, run the risk of no longer communicating anything because they tell too much. But they also possess another characteristic of the information industry: they no longer speak of anything except themselves and their internal functioning. The zenith is reached in some ladies' watches with imperceptible hands, just a marble face without hours or minutes, shaped in such a way that, at most, you could say we are somewhere between noon and midnight, and perhaps it's the day before yesterday. Anyway (as the designer hints), what else do the ladies for whom the watch is meant have to do, except look at a device that narrates its own vanity?
1988
Stars and Stripes
ASTROGRAM
FROM: GHQ, GALACTIC CORPS, SOL III
TO: ARMY COMMAND ZONE IV, URANUS
PER INFORMATION RECEIVED FLAGRANT EPISODES HOMOSEXUALITY OBSERVED BOOS FIRST ASSAULT FORCE STOP ALL RESPONSIBLE MUST BE IMMEDIATELY ELIMINATED STOP STRICT REPRESSION URGENTEST STOP
(SIGNED) GENERAL PERCUOCO, CIC, CASINO, MONACO
***
ASTROGRAM
FROM: ARMY COMMAND ZONE IV, URANUS
TO: GHQ, GALACTIC CORPS, SOL III
CASINO, MONACO
RESPECTFULLY INFORM GHQ THAT BOOS, NATIVES OF URANUS, ARE HERMAPHRODITE RACE (NO. 30015, INTERGALACTIC ETHNIC REGISTRY) STOP PRESUMED INSTANCES HOMOSEXUALITY AS PER DOCUMENTS SUBMITTED HEREWITH ARE HENCE NORMAL ESTABLISHED SEXUAL PRACTICE CONTEMPLATED IN URANUS LEGAL CODE AND INTERGALACTIC CONSTITUTION STOP
(SIGNED) COLONEL ZBZZ TSG, ACTING COMMANDER DURING ABSENCE GENERAL AGWRSS ON MATERNITY LEAVE
***
ASTROGRAM
FROM: GHQ, GALACTIC CORPS, SOL III
TO: ARMY HQ, ZONE V, PLUTO
THIS GHQ RELIABLY INFORMED OF FLAGRANT EPISODES PUBLIC MASTURBATION AMONG DIGGERS AND DRILLERS CORPS PLUTO STOP INSIST ON IMMEDIATE EXEMPLARY PUNISHMENT OF THOSE DIRECTLY INVOLVED INCLUDING OFFICERS RESPONSIBLE FOR INEXCUSABLE LAXITY OF DISCIPLINE
(SIGNED) GENERAL PERCUOCO, CIC, CASINO
***
ASTROGRAM
FROM: ARMY HQ, ZONE V, PLUTO
TO: GHQ, GALACTIC CORPS, SOL III
CASINO, MONACO
CLARIFICATION NECESSARY STOP PLUTO DRILLERS MEMBERS VERMIFORM RACE (HENCE BORING SKILLS AND EXCEPTIONAL PRODUCTIVITY GEOLOGICAL PROSPECTING PLUTO ZONE) REPRODUCE VIA PARTHENOGENESIS STOP IN CHARACTERISTIC DRILLER POSITION ANTERIOR EXTREMITY SUCKS POSTERIOR EXTREMITY PRODUCING SYMPTOMATIC ORGASM AND SUBSEQUENT SCISSION STOP NORMAL PROCEDURE CONTEMPLATED IN LOCAL ARMY REGULATIONS OTHERWISE FURTHER RECRUITMENT IMPOSSIBLE
(SIGNED) GENERAL BOOSAMMETH AND GENERAL BOOSAMETH
(REQUEST CONFIRMATION COMMANDER IDENTITY AFTER RECENT TOP LEVEL SCISSION)
***
ASTROGRAM
FROM: GHQ, GALACTIC CORPS, SOL III
TO: ARMY HQ, ZONE IV, URANUS
AND ARMY HQ, ZONE V, PLUTO
SPECIOUS EXCUSES UNACCEPTABLE STOP EXCESSIVE LAXITY UNDERMINING GALACTIC FORCES STRICT TRADITIONAL MORALITY, QUICK THINKING AND SCRUPULOUS HYGIENE ALSO PROUD TRADITION MARINE CORPS ROYAL CARABINEERS GRENADIER GUARDS SUBMITTING MASS RESIGNATIONS STOP ALL OFFENDERS CONFINED TO QUARTERS
(SIGNED) GENERAL PERCUOCO
CIC, CASINO
***
Intergalactic Commission for Defense of Ethnic Minorities
Fomalhaut (Piscis Australis)
Your Excellency, I am taking the liberty of drawing to your attention the episodes referred to in the enclosed file, which clearly suggests that General Percuoco (a Terrestrial, I presume) brings to the galactic military administration a mind-set I would say has been obsolete at least since the administration of President Flanagan, who (before his unfortunate assassination by an African fanatic) so intelligently defended the rights of marginal races to total equality. As you well know, the Flanagan doctrine decrees that all galactic beings are equal before the Great Matrix, irrespective of shape, number of scales or limbs, or even the physical state (solid, liquid, or gaseous) in which they happen to exist. The Intergalactic Federal Government has rightly established a High Commission for Cultural and Biological Relativity, which produces the Intergalactic Ethnic Registry and proposes to the High Court of Justice suitable additions and emendations to the intergalactic laws as terrestrial civilization expands to the farthest extremes of the Cosmos. After the fall of the Great Atomic Empires (the former Russia and America), when the peoples of the Mediterranean basin, thanks to the discovery of the energy-generating capacity of citric acid, became masters, first of Earth, and then of the entire universe, crisscrossing it with their astrocraft propelled by what a poet had extolled as "the golden trumpets of solar-ity," it seemed to all a good omen that dominion over the universe had been given to peoples who had previously suffered severe racial discrimination on their own planet. You surely recall the enthusiasm that greeted the Hefner Law, which allowed copulation between terrestrial women and the pentaphallic men of Jupiter—even though we all know the cost in bloodshed of this ill-starred pioneering experiment, which required the no doubt overvigorous males of Jupiter to satisfy five simultaneous urges in conjunction with a single univaginal female. But that undeniable breakthrough nevertheless inspired the intergalactic interracial laws that continue today to be the boast of our Federation.
It is a source of great general satisfaction, too, that our intergalactic military regulations have conformed to the principle of integration and, in fact, have established the principle that citizens should fulfill their military service requirement on a planet other than the one of their birth. We have noticed with great dismay, therefore, that this regulation has for a long time been flouted, as is evidenced by the fact that, like the drillers of Pluto, who serve today only on their native planet, the Boos Attack Force serves only on Uranus. This situation explains why General Percuoco, whose military and management skills are naturally beyond debate, is unaware of the anatomical details and reproductive methods of these troops. But Your Excellency can assess the enormity of this diplomatic incident from the television coverage of the consequent uprisings on the two planets involved.