March 2023 Newsletter: Sandusky Reckoning Launch and "The Significance of the Passage of Time!"📚🕰️
Hello Readers,
The date has arrived: Sandusky Reckoning publishes on March 17!
Army veteran Brady Sullivan is still camping solo at Sandusky Shores and has a whole new set of deadly problems! Without dropping spoilers, let’s just say that Brady’s high-risk mission to take out the crime syndicate in Sandusky Burning was less than completely successful. He is once again scrambling to turn the tables on the bad guys and get his life back!
"The Significance of the Passage of Time” The Vice President repeated this phrase four times during the course of a short speech last spring. It didn’t mean anything to me at the time, but it came to mind recently when I contemplated the folly of Daylight Saving Time.
At 2 am on March 12th, most of us in the US “sprang” our clocks forward an hour. This was to ensure that we would all have an extra hour of daylight to tend to our farms. The problem is that I don’t work on a farm. The odds are that you don’t, either.
This time change made sense when there were nearly 7 million farms in a country of 100 million. However, today there are around 2 million farms, so maybe we don’t need to disrupt the schedules of the 330 million non-farmers in order to squeeze out an extra hour of daylight? Most of the US was robbed of an hour of sleep, which takes a week to get used to, entirely because that is what we’ve done since 1918…
(In all fairness, energy savings was also cited as an excuse, but I am also skeptical that biannual clock manipulation actually saves enough energy to make it worth the hassle!)
My deep contemplation of the “significance of the passage of time” also sent me down the rabbit hole of considering our relationship with the accuracy of time. For people of my generation (Gen X) and older, recall that we generally didn't know the exact time; our watches and clocks were all manually calibrated.
Whether it was wind-up, electric, or battery-powered, a human had to set the time; no signals were beaming the time down from geosynchronous satellites. So, when we needed to verify the time and adjust our timekeeping instruments, what was the authority?
Radio programs periodically announced the time. TV programs began on the hour or half hour. Therefore, if the Dukes of Hazzard theme song blared in mono from your gigantic wood-enshrined Zenith television on Friday night, it was definitely 9 pm. If a white tuxedoed Hervé Villechaize was yelling “De plane! De plane!” to kick off Fantasy Island on Saturday night, it was a few minutes after 9 pm. And so on with shows like Happy Days, The Love Boat, Three's Company, etc.
We could also "call time". In my area, that number was 234-1212. Dial that up on your rotary phone, and a pleasant-sounding recorded female voice recited the time every fifteen seconds: "At the tone, the time will be…9…15…am…and 30 seconds.” If you were a diehard about the accuracy of your watch, you listened until she reached the exact minute, and then spun the big hand on your watch clockwise a tick at the tone.
Today, time precision is commonplace. My GPS watch, iPhone, laptop, etc., are all fully synched. The only remnants of our time-uncertain past are microwave and oven clocks, which require manual calibration after power outages, and the twice-a-year government-mandated clock adjustments.
A special thanks to everyone on my newsletter mailing list, which continues to grow every month! I outgrew my previous mail carrier's audience size limit and switched to a new platform this month, a great problem to have!
Happy St. Patrick's Day - see you in April!
Take care,
Bryan
Click the Book above to Order Today!
His friend is on life support. He’s about to be next. As an RV campground becomes a war zone, will he be the next victim in a body bag?
Brady Sullivan won’t go down without a fight. Hours after retaliating against the savage gang that attacked him and his family, he struggles to stay one step ahead of a corrupt sheriff pushing for his arrest. But he’s forced to flee to another hideout when a vicious crime lord paints a target on his back…
Going dark in a motel room, Brady vows to balance the scales as cruelly staged photos surface endangering his floundering marriage and career. But with competing factions intent on setting him up for the fall, he fears any attempt to engage could end up dead on arrival.
Can he win a brutal power struggle before he takes a fatal bullet?
Sandusky Reckoning is the nail-biting second book in the Sandusky Darkness crime thriller series. If you like characters under siege, shocking twists and turns, and fast-paced action, then you’ll love Bryan W. Conway’s riveting tale.