INDEPENDENT NEWS

Irish Eyes: On the Time

Published: Sat 8 Jan 2000 11:23 AM
Time, what is it? Like the weather it is something to talk about. And like the weather you have to take it has it comes. And it keeps on coming, at the speed of light.
Whatever it is it sometimes makes you late for work. To combat this you need to put your watch back five minutes, this way you will always be running behind time and will be in a hurry to catch up with it, which, almost as if by magic, will mean you will arrive on time, hot and bothered.
And if you are still late you can blame it on your watch being slow.
But back to the beginning a moment, just tricking the beginning has gone, and we are in the middle, discussing time and things that you can't buy in a shop, like the weather.
There is no greater mystery than misery, according to Orson Welles. The weather used to be mysterious back when it rained all winter and shone all summer and we drew pictures of houses with smiling suns in the left hand corner. Before satellite's shifted the mystery spacewards and text messaging removed all our loneliness. The Marie Celeste is pretty mysterious too, I guess it is mysterious in a miserable way, which might be what Orson meant.
Another thing that is mysterious is money, in so many different ways. For example it costs about 2 cents to produce an American $100 bank note. If the US buys a case of bananas from some other country with that 100 dollar bill and the bill remains in use in the country from where the banana came from then the US has bought a case of bananas for about 2 cents. Sixty percent of US bank notes are in use outside the country. Its quite bananas really.

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