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November 4, 2001 time travel An alert reader has pointed out to me that our country has, in fact, been attacked by terrorists.  Apparently, some planes were flown where they should not have been and there is a threat from Amtrak.  I never thought I'd see the day our country was threatened by trains.  Then again, I cannot believe the cynical rumblings that Britney Spears is aware of her sexuality. If you are my age, and I sincerely hope you are not, then you know that "Lassie" used to come on television on Sunday evenings.  As I grew to hate Sundays, being situated immediately before Monday as they are, I began to associate collies with dread and separation.  I call it Lassie Syndrome.  I also developed "Hop Sing Syndrome" such that I cannot view an Oriental house servant without experiencing substantial anxiety; for that matter, I feel blue any time I see three grown men still living with a man they call "Pa." Many of us feel that time passes more quickly the older we become;  however, most of you are under the mistaken impression that this is an illusion.  It is not.  And to prove it, I bought two identical watches, synchronized the time settings and handed one to a young "subject" I recruited away from his day job of loitering outside St. Patrick's emergency room.  I instructed the teenager to sit in the ER waiting room and watch "Days of Our Lives."  At the end of the hour-long program, the subject would walk his watch across the street to the Alhambra at which time we would compare "youthful time" to "old fart time."  Under my hypothesis, the subject's watch would show that an hour had elapsed whereas the watch I was wearing would place me two weeks from Tuesday into the future.  And guess what my experiment proved?  It proved you should not give a new watch to a young vagrant.

©  2001 by the beastmaster