Pearls Before Swine by Stephan Pastis for August 04, 2019

I ran up my folks’ phone bill calling sports phone.

Pig didn’t really explain that well, to be honest.

Time lady, sorry you’ve been replaced by a machine in real life. Automation sucks, babe.

Pig, you don’t have the time to retreat into the past.

Time Lady is behind the — intentional pun? — times.

We now also have www.time.gov. A great way to set your watches.

I remember being able to call up radio station WWV to get the official government atomic clock time. You can still call it, but I haven’t done it in years.

Time lady reinvented herself and became ‘Alexa’.

And where does Superman go to strip down to his skivvies?

Does anyone really know what time it is?

When was the last time you called and had an actual person give you the time? That service has been automated for decades.

Older people have always complained about the present and embraced the past like it was some sort of eutopia. That was true even when I was a kid.

“Boy the way Glen Miller played. Songs that made the Hit Parade. Guys like me we had it made. Those were the days.”

My first job was at a (state owned) radio station, where we had our control room (CR) clock synced via satellite to the National Physical Laboratory in Delhi. Our local telephone exchange would call up every morning at 6:00 AM to correct their clock.

The twist was when the people in the CR were too busy or if there was no one at the desk, they would call one of us at the program desk of one of the two channels. We only had the large wind-up clock faces in front of us to tell the time. They were maintained by the CR engineers. We never disappointed the exchange people – but who knows how correct those clocks were?! After a few weeks on the job, I started to use my own digital Casio to update the callers because I used it to time the programs from the desk and was more accurate than the clock.

Anyway, that’s all by the way – a bit of nostalgia for me!

Today’s comic is sponsored by Trying Times smartwatch. Trying Times smartwatch tries to tell you the time all the time. Good times or bad times, lunch times or dinner times, or you simply want to know the time some times, Trying Times will try to tell you the time every time. Never miss a moment and always be on time with Trying Times smartwatch. Also available as an app for Android and iOS.

M-E-R-M-A-I-D: "At the tone, the time will be… 5… 14… and 10 seconds. beep

This does still work! I tried it several months ago. It was time & weather. There was even an ad first.

There are times when I really agree with Pig…

Pink Floyd ….. “Time” ….Tic…Toc…Tic…Toc …… Croc Power!

In the town I grew up in it was time and temperature, “brought to you” by some local bank.

If you have a shortwave (HF) radio, you can still tune to WWV, and get the time in UTC, every minute on the minute.

Shouldn’t she have, like, a clock or something?

I recall seeing the number in question posted by some friendly and helpful people on some bathroom walls here and there…

“For a good time call 358-1212”…

“There is nothing new under the sun.”

There was a Short Wave station that did nothing but beep once a second, and then a voice would announce Greenwich Mean Time. Obviously, the most boring radio station in the world, but it fascinated me as an eight-year-old.

Funny, I expected her to look like Lily Tomlin.

The last refuge for bored kids in the hot summer, call the time lady. Gosh, that’s the ghost of innocent youth past. I’m with pig; to be so bored once again the sheer comfort of it to have anon.

There’s something to be said of yesteryear! I long for those days at times….for peace and quiet, no bells and whistles, beeps, tunes, clangs, and not so much information. Sigh

I’ve heard of a machine called the “speaking clock”. It had a voice recording of some Australian fellow giving the time every ten seconds, followed by three beeps. For example, “At the third stroke, it will be seven-seventeen and thirty seconds.” (BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!)

TIGER11

I like that she has a rotary dial phone.

In my area, it was 222-2222 for time and weather, sponsored by a local bank.

She needs to get together with Weather Man.

Simpler times. 8:55 am to be precise.

“Mostly to take pictures of our food and be mean.” (sigh)

I love it! 9th grade English teacher is glad to see that Pig isn’t always the fool.

I always called popcorn, but I think there were variations.

Today’s phones have incredible potential to keep us informed and connected. It’s so sad to see how they have been wasted and perverted for such worthless and counterproductive silly reasons.

Long ago before I went to Indy I called and asked their time. Then I made my flight arrangements. They weren’t civilized enough to have a Time number, so I called a local bank.

The popular old story from the days of landlines and expensive long distance charges (when long distance calls were routinely about $3 for 3 minutes, so $1 each minute for calls made within the US. Foreign calls were much more expensive) – A guy dumps his wife for a new girlfriend and tells the wife he’s going on a romantic week-long vacation with his new lover and that his wife has to be moved out before he gets back. A week later he comes home, she has moved out, but he hears something strange. Looking around he finds the phone off the hook. Picking it up he hears the automated voice of a time check number, reading off the time every 10 seconds. From 10 time zones away. There are 10,080 minutes in 1 week.

I used to be able to dial up the local weather too. Now I can find it on the Internet. It’s right underneath the screen-spanning pop-up advertisement pages…

Did anyone else notice that the Time Lady lives in Coconino County? I expected to see Gooseberry Sprigg walking past her house (which is balanced on one precarious support, like so many things in Coconino County).

Since she is a ‘time lady’, couldn’t she just go to her TARDIS and go anywhen she wants?

One of my favorite Ziggy cartoons has him holding the phone with a bemused look as the voice says, “at the time, the tone will be F-Sharp.”

We had a sundial, it only worked half of the time.

Just last week our local newspaper had a story about the new time and temperature number. Seems the old sponsor dropped it and a new one took its place. So I guess there still is a time and temperature number for our area.

1-202-762-1401 for east coast time

Ahh, the Past! Love it or be doomed to repeat it, whichever applies….

#metoo!

I do! I do! In Memphis, TN circa 1972 the phone number for time was JAMJAM6. Easy to remember. Impossible to forget.