Cinemorphosis

Tag: travel

  • The Frogman Conversion: When a Mechanical Loyalist Defects

    The Frogman Conversion: When a Mechanical Loyalist Defects

    Over the last twenty years of my watch madness, I have pilgrimaged to the Land of Mechanical Divers and have felt comfortable there. I have friends in the community who live in a distant tribe, the Land of G-Shock Precision. I respect them, I hear their calls from the distance–a prairie, a tundra, a rocky coast. I even sometimes run into them at Costco. I consider them honorable friends of mine, these G-Shock wearers, but I have always seen myself of someone who comes from another tribe. I did try to venture into their territory from time to time, purchasing handsome $100 G-Shocks, but I never bonded with them, and I ended up giving them away as gifts, and felt relieved afterwards. 

    This isn’t to say I am immune from the allure of G-Shock. There is one in particular that has smitten me for well over ten years. It is the Frogman GWF-1000. Unlike my mechanical divers, this is no analog beast. It is digital atomic. I have always been drawn to its professional tool look, its massive wrist presence, its lineage to the Seiko Arnie, and its bold asymmetry.

    So I told myself I would get one G-Shock to the fold. It would be more of a gimmick piece, an adornment for cosplay, a sort of joke. But I was wrong. Very wrong. As soon as I put it on my wrist, it felt it had melded to my skin, and it was part of me. The words “Tough Solar” seemed like a beckoning call of reassurance. 

    But what really killed me was the unexpected. I always have had a philosophic contempt for digital time, equating it with soulless phones and smartwatches. Digital time was a betrayal of my analog retro diver vibe. Or so I thought. As I looked down at my Frogman’s digital atomic readout, I found myself loving the legibility and accuracy more than my analog divers. 

    Take the classic cars from my youth. Those late-60 models of Mustang and Barracuda. Yes, they are lookers. But they don’t drive well compared to today’s cars. They squeak, they bounce, they have subpar climate control. Get into a new car and you can’t compare the technology and the comfort to vintage cars of old. Wearing my Frogman, I felt I had exited a creaky vintage car and was now gliding inside a technical marvel.

    I hate to admit this, but I now resent squinting my eyes at analog watches. I hate even more wondering why it is acceptable that a watch that costs thousands of dollars is less accurate than my atomic Frogman. 

    I don’t know what is happening to me. I don’t know where my mind will be in six months. All I know is this Frogman and its comforting atomic digital readout is not leaving my wrist.

    Friends of the watch community, hear me: You may be witnessing a Tribal Migration Event: the moment a collector crosses a long-standing identity boundary—mechanical to quartz, analog to digital, diver to tool watch—and discovers unexpected belonging. What begins as a temporary visit or novelty purchase becomes a relocation of allegiance. The emotional shock comes not from the new watch itself but from the realization that one’s horological identity was less fixed than previously believed.

  • The G-Shock Frogman and the Bureaucratic State

    The G-Shock Frogman and the Bureaucratic State

    Over the past forty-eight hours, DHL has sent me approximately two dozen updates about my G-Shock Frogman GWF-1000. Each message arrives with the urgency of a geopolitical crisis, as if the watch were a sensitive diplomatic asset being escorted through a chain of unstable regimes.

    Update received.
    Status changed.
    Action required.

    At one point, a text informed me that I needed to verify my identity—name, address, confirmation that I am indeed the lawful civilian awaiting a rubber-strapped amphibious instrument. I complied immediately. Filled out the form. Submitted the data. Received confirmation.

    Case closed, I thought.

    Case not closed.

    The Frogman is now stranded in customs, apparently under suspicion of either espionage, tariff evasion, or unauthorized aquatic activity.

    I contacted DHL customer service. A courteous representative informed me that my shipment would be “investigated” and that I should expect an email within a few hours. At this stage, I am waiting to learn what additional documentation, declaration, or ceremonial tribute will be required before the watch is released back into the general population.

    The order was placed eleven days ago through Sakura. I’ve purchased from them before without incident. This time, however, the experience feels less like shipping and more like applying for a mid-level government clearance. Whether the delay is caused by tariffs, enforcement changes, or the invisible hand of bureaucratic entropy, I cannot say.

    What I do know is that the process introduces a new emotional variable into overseas buying: friction. Not the minor inconvenience of delay, but the slow accumulation of uncertainty—the growing suspicion that any international purchase may evolve into a procedural endurance event.

    Buying a watch is supposed to generate anticipation.

    This generates vigilance.

    The promise of modern commerce is frictionless efficiency: click, ship, deliver. What I’m experiencing is its bureaucratic inverse. Identity verification. Clearance holds. Investigation windows. Status alerts arriving like play-by-play commentary from a logistics obstacle course.

    This isn’t tracking.

    This is surveillance—of my own anxiety.

    I appear to be suffering from Customs Suspense Syndrome: a condition in which a routine shipment becomes a serialized drama of ambiguity and delay. The buyer no longer follows a package; he refreshes a timeline the way a patient checks for lab results, searching for signs of life.

    Ordering a watch should not feel like running a gauntlet.

    Yet here we are.

    This is not frictionless commerce.

    This is American Gladiators: Customs Edition.

  • The Watch That Quietly Took Over Your Life

    The Watch That Quietly Took Over Your Life

    Every so often, a strange coup takes place inside a watch collection. One piece—sometimes a $50 Casio, sometimes a $5,000 Tudor—quietly stages a takeover. It doesn’t announce its intentions. It simply shows up on your wrist one morning… and then the next… and then every day after that. Before long, the rest of the collection sits in the watch box like retired generals, decorated but inactive. Without ceremony, without debate, you’ve acquired a Watch Buddy—the one piece that absorbs nearly all your wrist time and rewrites the rules of your ownership.

    What makes the phenomenon unsettling is that you didn’t go looking for it. This was not your grail, your research obsession, your late-night forum fixation. It just happened. Somewhere between errands, workouts, and ordinary Tuesdays, the watch proved itself comfortable, legible, reliable, emotionally neutral in the best way. You wake up one day and realize you’re living inside the Accidental Grail Effect: a lifelong favorite that earned its status the old-fashioned way—by being easy to live with. No mythology. No prestige theater. Just quiet competence and the absence of friction.

    Curiously, most enthusiasts don’t liquidate the rest of the collection once the hierarchy becomes obvious. The other watches remain in their slots, like supporting actors who make the lead look better simply by standing nearby. Their presence sharpens the contrast. The Watch Buddy doesn’t just win—it wins by comparison, day after day, until its dominance feels less like a choice and more like gravity.

    This is not a honeymoon. Honeymoons are loud, hormonal, and short-lived—social-media enthusiasm followed by the inevitable cooling. The Watch Buddy is something else entirely: a long marriage. The dopamine fades, the novelty disappears, and what remains is habit, trust, and emotional silence. From that point forward, the collector’s behavior changes. The chase slows. The fantasy of the next perfect watch loses voltage. Because once you’ve found the one you actually live in, the rest of the hobby begins to look like what it always was—auditions.

  • The Illusion of Variety: Why All My Watches Look the Same

    The Illusion of Variety: Why All My Watches Look the Same

    My wife looks at my watch box and delivers her verdict with the efficiency of a forensic accountant: they’re all the same. Dark dials. Rotating bezels. Nuclear lume. Rubber straps. To her, I don’t own a collection—I own nine copies of the same idea. A redundancy with slightly different logos.

    I protest, of course. This one has a warmer dial tone. That one wears thinner. The other has superior bezel action and lume that could guide aircraft at night. To me, each piece has a personality, a purpose, a place in the rotation. But the uncomfortable truth remains: they are all divers. I am not merely a watch enthusiast. I am a subtype addict. Once the diver aesthetic locked onto my brain, every future desire began passing through that single filter.

    The roots of this pathology go back to childhood, where my mother enabled my early training in the Illusion of Variety. My diet revolved around Cap’n Crunch in all its alleged diversity: plain, Crunch Berries, Peanut Butter, plus the rebranded cousins—Quisp, Quake, King Vitamin—each promising novelty while delivering the same sugar-coated destiny. I approached these cereals with the seriousness of a sommelier comparing vintages, convinced I was exploring nuance while eating the same bowl under different costumes. It was freedom without risk, choice without change. A sugary Groundhog Day.

    Looking back, the pattern is obvious. I didn’t want options; I wanted reassurance disguised as options. Real variety carries danger—the possibility of regret, mismatch, or disappointment. Sameness offers safety. Familiar shapes, familiar flavors, familiar outcomes. Bliss with guardrails.

    That same psychology now lives in my watch box. Different brands, different cases, different shades of black—but always the same architecture, the same toolish language, the same emotional terrain. To outsiders, monotony. To me, refinement.

    This is the Category Fixation Loop: the moment a collector discovers the one design language that feels right and thereafter interprets every new desire through that narrow lens. The hobby doesn’t expand; it tunnels. Each purchase feels like exploration, but the geography never changes.

    On one level, my watches are identical. On another, they are infinitely different. The contradiction is the point. Variety, safely contained inside sameness—the Cap’n Crunch strategy, now rated to 200 meters.

  • When Bold Becomes Desperate: The Toxic Green Frogman I Didn’t Buy

    When Bold Becomes Desperate: The Toxic Green Frogman I Didn’t Buy

    The limited-edition G-Shock Frogman GW-8200TPF-1 is called the “Three-Striped Poison Dart Frog,” a name that tells you everything you need to know. Its case and bezel are streaked in oily black and radioactive neon green, a visual homage to the rainforest amphibians whose skin carries enough toxin to tip a hunting arrow. The watch doesn’t whisper. It hisses. It looks less like a timepiece and more like something that escaped from a biohazard lab. And I have to admit: I could see it on my wrist.

    Which is precisely the problem.

    I am sixty-four years old. This watch belongs on the arm of a young man who still believes the world is a stage and he is the headliner. On me, it risks reading like a cautionary tale. I picture myself as the suburban retiree on a zebra-striped Harley, shirtless under a leather vest, ponytail fluttering, ears weighed down with fishing-lure jewelry. Not rebellion—neediness. Not confidence—pleading. In this light, the Poison Dart becomes what I now recognize as a Final Cry Watch: the late-career purchase meant to shout, I’m still dangerous, when the quieter truth is that one is negotiating a truce with time.

    And yet the attraction persists. That’s the uncomfortable part. Awareness does not cancel desire; it merely narrates it. A part of me even welcomes the idea of restraint—the sedation that comes from declining the spectacle, choosing dignity over fluorescent self-advertisement.

    In the end, what saved me was not wisdom but suspicion. That dramatic spray coating—how long before it fades, chips, or peels? And when the neon begins to die, what remains? Not a bold statement. Not a heroic relic. An Insult Watch—a once-loud object aging badly, like a midlife impulse left out in the sun.

    So the purchase died where many impulses should: in the quiet courtroom of anticipated regret. The Poison Dart remains what it probably was all along—not destiny, not transformation, just a bright, dangerous flirtation with caprice.

  • Buy Now, Regret Later: How Ancient Instincts Ruined Modern Shopping

    Buy Now, Regret Later: How Ancient Instincts Ruined Modern Shopping

    In the early 1990s, I saw comedian Rob Becker perform Defending the Caveman in San Francisco—a one-man anthropology class disguised as stand-up. His central thesis, stitched together from kitchen-table spats with his wife, was that men are hunters, women are gatherers, and this prehistoric wiring still runs our modern relationships like a bad operating system.

    His proof? Shopping.

    For the gatherer, shopping is a leisurely daydream. Wandering the mall for six hours and imagining buying things she can’t afford is an enriching sensory experience—like spiritual window-shopping. For the hunter, shopping is a surgical strike. He wants pants. He buys pants. He leaves. The suggestion to “just browse” makes his eye twitch.

    “Let’s get the hell out of here,” says the man. He has completed his mission. He has felled the beast.

    That moment—man as single-focus, tunnel-visioned, goal-oriented predator—explains a great deal about the pathology of watch addiction. We are still cavemen, just hairier and worse at squatting. And we don’t hunt food anymore. We hunt wristwear.

    We see a watch online and a brontosaurus steak lights up in our brain. Locked in. Target acquired. Our dopamine circuits spark like faulty Christmas lights. We must have it. There is no tranquility, no peace, until the object is in our possession.

    The problem? Our primitive instincts weren’t designed for the digital age. Back then, acquiring a new object meant trekking through wilderness, battling saber-toothed tigers, and earning your meal. Today, it’s clicking a “Buy Now” button while half-watching a YouTube review at your ergonomic standing desk, surrounded by a sea of unopened Amazon boxes. Intoxicated by online shopping platforms, we are overcome with the Horological Hunt Reflex–the involuntary lock-on response triggered by spotting a desirable watch. Once activated, attention narrows, patience evaporates, and the collector cannot rest until the object is captured—regardless of need, cost, or logic.

    Our brains still think we’re walking 40 miles to spear a mammoth. In reality, we’re reclining in office chairs with lumbar support, ordering $2,000 divers like they’re takeout sushi. The hunt requires no sacrifice, no sweat, no real effort. And so it never satisfies.

    This caveman instinct affects our watch hobby. We get the watch. We admire it. We post a photo to Instagram. Then—we twitch. We fidget. Our brain says, “Good job. Now go get another.”

    We are not content in the cave. Evolution didn’t design us for stillness. It designed us to be hungry. To prepare. To hoard. So we keep hunting. And the cave fills with stainless steel trophies until the glint attracts low-flying pterodactyls that dive-bomb us in our sleep and try to pluck the Omega off our wrist.

    We are maladapted creatures. Our eyeballs evolved for survival. Now they doom us. We were built to scan the horizon for danger. Now we scan Hodinkee, Instagram, Reddit, eBay, WatchRecon, and Chrono24 until our dopamine is a wrung-out dishrag and our bank account is an obituary.

    We’re trapped in a glitch—stone-age instincts, 5G bandwidth. Our visual fixation, once essential to survival, now chains us to a cycle of desire and regret. Thousands of watches flood our screens in a single hour, and our brains are too old and too soft to resist. The only real solution is exile. But exile from what? Our jobs, our networks, our entire digital lives?

    There is no cave to retreat to. Just another tab open.

  • Why Good Salsa Matters

    Why Good Salsa Matters

    In 1967, my father took me to the grand opening of a Taco Bell in San Jose, California. This was my first encounter with fast food as spectacle—and with teenagers as a category of human being. They stood behind the registers in a loose formation, and every one of them appeared to be afflicted with the same alarming facial condition. Spots everywhere. An outbreak.

    I was five. I did the math available to me. Had a disease swept through the workforce? Did Taco Bell exposure cause lesions? Were the refried beans radioactive?

    I asked my father what was wrong with their faces.

    “They’re pimples,” he said. Then, without hesitation, he added, “According to Aristotle, God gives pimples to teenagers to teach them humility.”

    I knew immediately this was untrue. Not because I had read Aristotle—I hadn’t—but because I knew my father. This was him doing what he loved most: inventing authority on the spot. He also harbored a low-grade contempt for teenagers, whom he regarded as overconfident and undercooked. Acne, in his view, was divine pushback. Cosmic slapstick.

    The pimples unsettled me, but they did not interfere with my appetite. I ate my tacos and frijoles under the Taco Bell canopy, admiring the beige stone “Mexican” architecture—the aesthetic equivalent of a sombrero on a filing cabinet. The food itself was a novelty. We didn’t eat Mexican food, and Taco Bell certainly wasn’t Mexican food, but it was a portal. A gateway drug.

    Within a few years, my mother was making tacos, burritos, and enchiladas at home. Our Mexican-American neighbors, Mike and Felice Orozco, made salsa from ingredients grown in our own backyards. The salsa lived on the coffee table in a volcanic tureen, like something sacred and faintly dangerous. You could smell it the moment you walked into the living room—chilies, onions, garlic, alive and unapologetic.

    The color stopped you. A deep ruby red. Not restaurant red. Not industrial red. Real red. I have eaten excellent salsa over the decades, but nothing has ever matched the salsa Felice Orozco taught my mother to make in the late 1960s. Even now, if a Mexican restaurant brings out a pre-meal salsa that approaches that standard—even halfway—I take it as a sign of moral seriousness.

    Felice Orozco’s salsa wasn’t just delicious. It was philosophical. It carried an unspoken argument about what survives and what matters. When families pass down food traditions, they’re saying something quietly radical: some knowledge deserves care, repetition, and fidelity. This isn’t about novelty or performance. It’s not about artisanal swagger or bragging rights. It’s about love made practical. Wisdom with onions.

    So what was Taco Bell to me as a child? A desecration of Mexican food? No. It was a signpost. A crude outpost with a faint aroma of the real thing. It pointed toward a richer city beyond itself—a place where food meant connection, where flavors carried memory and generosity.

    The sign didn’t point south.
    It pointed to Felice Orozco’s house.

  • Living in the Bottle: A Life Spent Building Cozy Universes

    Living in the Bottle: A Life Spent Building Cozy Universes

    My parents like to remind me that I grew up poor in a cockroach-infested assisted-living situation in Gainesville, Florida. The place was called Flavet Villages—Flavet, if you lived there, which everyone did because there was nowhere else to go. These were not “villages” in any meaningful sense. They were World War II–era Camp Blanding army barracks, uprooted from Jacksonville and dropped into North Florida like surplus history.

    What I love, even now, is the audacity of the name. Flavet Villages. It’s a master class in rebranding: take a barracks crawling with roaches and give it a pastoral plural noun. It’s the real-estate equivalent of dabbing Vicks VapoRub on your neck and calling it Menthol d’Après-Minuit.

    Flavet sat near an alligator swamp and a stretch of forest that felt mythic to me, even then. A Mynah bird lived there—always on the same branch, like a sentry or an oracle—and before bedtime my father and I would walk to the edge of the woods and talk to it. At dusk, the tide dropped, and the swamp revealed itself. Alligator dung, fully expressed. The smell was feral and unmistakable. While most people would recoil, I found it oddly soothing—bracing, even. As if the universe were saying, You’re here. This is real.

    As a native Floridian, I sometimes wonder—with a perverse sense of pride—whether my early exposure to fecal alligator swamps permanently rewired my sensory thresholds in ways outsiders could never understand.

    One evening, as my father and I stood at the forest’s edge, we heard a distant radio playing Juanita Hall’s rendition of “Bali Ha’i” from South Pacific. The song is about an island paradise that seems achingly close yet forever unreachable, and it’s meant to induce longing and melancholy. But I felt none of that. Paradise was already present. I was standing in an enchanted forest with my storytelling father, a talking bird, mythical alligators nearby, and music drifting in like a siren call. This was not longing; this was habitation. I lived in a fairy tale and had no interest in leaving it.

    That same ache—for a magical enclosure—returned when I was five and living in the Royal Lanai Apartments in San Jose. The grounds were landscaped with sunflowers and volcanic rock, and as I walked to the playground I would stare at the flower beds and wish I could shrink myself down to Lilliputian size and live inside them forever. That was my first lesson in coziness: the idea that a small, bounded world could feel safer, richer, and more alive than the vast one surrounding it.

    Then came I Dream of Jeannie. Barbara Eden’s blonde goddess lived inside a genie bottle—a jewel-lined cocoon with a purple circular sofa and pink satin pillows glowing like some erotic reliquary. More than anything, I wanted to live in that bottle with her. The impossibility of that wish crushed me with the same quiet sadness as “Bali Ha’i.” That the bottle was, in reality, a painted Jim Beam decanter only deepened the metaphor. I was intoxicated by fantasy long before I understood the word.

    Flavet Village, the swamp forest, the Royal Lanai flower beds, Jeannie’s bottle—these were all variations on the same theme: cozy ecosystems that stood apart from the real world while quietly shaping how I understood it. Without those parallel universes, reality would have been flatter, harsher, less survivable.

    Now, in my sixties, I’ve built a new ecosystem: my watch world. A watch box holding seven watches that I tend like a mother hen, fretting over straps and bracelets, endlessly optimizing the rotation to extract maximum pleasure from time itself. It’s a controlled universe, one I can enter when the outside world becomes too loud or incoherent. I always come back—but I’m aware of the danger. The pull can be strong. Swapping a Tropic strap for a Waffle may calm me in the moment, but eventually I have to step out of the bottle, leave the forest, and reenter a world that demands attention, judgment, and responsibility.

    The fantasy sustains me. It just can’t replace the world.

  • The Shingles Shot, the Vanishing Kettlebell Workout, and a Brief Descent Into Strap Madness

    The Shingles Shot, the Vanishing Kettlebell Workout, and a Brief Descent Into Strap Madness

    I got my shingles vaccine yesterday at noon and felt absolutely nothing afterward—so nothing, in fact, that I woke up the next morning feeling smugly invincible. I went to Trader Joe’s, bantered with the employees about the collective psychosis surrounding their limited-edition mini tote bags, came home, unloaded the groceries, and mentally penciled in a righteous kettlebell session in the garage. Then, right around 10 a.m., my immune system cleared its throat. A slow, heavy wave of fatigue rolled in, the kind that doesn’t ask permission. I took what I told myself was a “precautionary” nap. I made a deal with my body: if I felt fine in an hour, the kettlebells were back on. By 11, the aches had arrived, lethargy had unpacked its bags, and the deal was quietly voided. The iron would have to wait.

    Now, 28 hours post-shot, I’m more tired than I was this morning, which feels like a violation of some unspoken contract. In what I can only describe as a low-grade vaccine fever fugue, I apparently decided this was the perfect moment to perform strap surgery on my watch collection. The Seiko SLA051, 055, and 023 all lost their OEM waffle straps and emerged reborn on Divecore FKM. Yes, I’m aware that FKM is rumored to whisper chemical lullabies into the bloodstream. No, I’m not persuaded that wearing these watches a few hours a week is going to tip me into a Superfund site.

    In any case, I’m already planning to swap the FKMs for Divecore’s hydrogenated waffle straps in a few months. If there’s any exposure happening, it’s brief, intermittent, and vastly overshadowed by whatever biochemical fireworks the shingles vaccine is currently setting off inside me. For now, I’ll rest, hydrate, and let my immune system do its thing—apparently with a side hobby in horological rearrangement.

  • Flying First Class Is a State of Mind

    Flying First Class Is a State of Mind

    I was born in America in 1961, and if I had to explain this country to a foreigner in one image, I wouldn’t reach for the flag or the Statue of Liberty. I’d point to flying first class. Not the policy of it, not the logistics—just the concept. First class is America in an airline cabin. It grabs you by the collar and says, This is how we do hierarchy. We don’t hide it. We parade it down the aisle.

    Yes, we have our obnoxious luxury cars and coastal dream houses, but nowhere is class difference so intimate as on an airplane. You’re breathing the same recycled air as the people sipping champagne up front. You share the same narrow aisle, the same claustrophobic bathrooms, the same airborne flu incubator. 

    The difference is ceremonial. The first-class passenger is already settled—wrapped in a sherpa blanket, nibbling brie, greeted by flight attendants who address them the way courtiers addressed minor royalty. 

    Then comes the procession: coach passengers filing past, stealing glances, marching toward the back where crying babies, bare feet with ambitious toenails, and circulation-threatening seat pitch await. This is the real luxury—not the champagne, but the ceremony and the choreography. The pleasure is sharpened by contrast. As a first-classer, you’re not cruel. You don’t wish misery on anyone. But your comfort glows brighter because someone else is uncomfortable ten feet away.

    And that glow whispers. Not “you’re lucky.” Not “you’re comfortable.” It whispers the more dangerous phrase: you’re special. That’s the real drug of first class—not legroom, but psychological elevation. The sense that you cracked some hidden code of life, that you’ve unlocked a cheat mode where ordinary frustrations can’t touch you. 

    I once heard a comedian joke that in a plane crash, first-class passengers would survive while the rest of us perished. It’s absurd. And yet… it sounds exactly like something we want to believe.

    This is America. You don’t just earn money here. You earn the right to hear that whisper.

    I’ll confess something anticlimactic: I flew first class once, in 1994, thanks to my father, who sent me to his condo in Maui. I remember almost nothing about it. No ecstasy. No glow. Maybe I suffer from flight anhedonia—the inability to experience joy at 30,000 feet. 

    But I have felt the first-class sensation elsewhere. A friend once let me borrow his Omega Planet Ocean. I wore it to Trader Joe’s and found myself standing in line with organic arugula and the faint, ridiculous thrill of superiority. A luxury watch did what a luxury airline seat never could.

    I could afford such a watch. I owned a Tudor Black Bay once. I sold it quickly, like someone who realized halfway through a costume party that he’d come dressed as the wrong person.

    Now I’m sixty-four, and the urge to gloat has evaporated. I don’t want status anymore. I want clarity. I want restraint. I want a temperament that doesn’t need applause from inanimate objects. Wearing an expensive watch I don’t need feels less like success and more like cosplay—me auditioning for the role of a man who’s made it. The problem is, I know the actor too well. Under the costume is not a titan of confidence but an anxious, fractured soul with the spiritual DNA of Franz Kafka and the comedic timing of Richard Lewis. No amount of Swiss engineering is going to fix that. And pretending otherwise would only make me feel like a fool in very fine clothes.