Around The World In 79 Days

 

Norene and I are toying with the idea of a trans-Pacific cruise next year, Seattle to Australia/New Zealand.  If we go, we will cross both the Equator and the International Date Line and this got me to thinking — always a dangerous situation.

In Jules Verne's Around The World In 80 Days, the plot twist hinges on the fact that Phileas Fogg travels eastward from London.  As a result, each day's sunset is a little earlier than yesterday's.  In the days before time zones, local time was established by local noon, and it was customary for travelers to set their timepieces to that local standard.  When in Rome...

Because each of Fogg's 'days' was shorter than the canonical 24-hours, he actually arrives back in London a full day ahead of his deadline — but doesn't realize it because he has seen 80 sunsets (in 79 days), although, realistically, when he got to San Francisco, he must certainly have wondered why Thursday's newspaper was being published on Friday...

(Aside: the phenomenon is said to have been discovered by the 17th-century Norwegian explorer, Andersrag, who named it after himself: the Alex Andersrag Time Band...)

In the modern world, we accept that crossing the International Date Line west-to-east involves crossing into yesterday, and crossing east-to-west into tomorrow.  Why should this be so?  Let's perform a little thought-experiment:

We start with two observers in London at 8am on a Tuesday, both with clocks set to GMT and we send both on a high-speed trip (able to cross vast distances in the wink of an eye), one westward to American Samoa, and the other eastward to Tonga.  They are instructed to change their clocks backward or forward as appropriate for the time zone they're currently in.  The one traveling eastward to Tonga will constantly set the clock forward from 8am to 9am to 10am until arriving at Tonga 12 time zones later at 8pm Tuesday.  The other travels west to American Samoa inching his clock backward to 7am and 6am until arriving in American Samoa 11 time zones earlier at 9pm Monday.  At this point, the two observers are a (reasonably) short flight from each other and their clocks say different days.  One of them must be wrong, right?  No, they're both right.

They're both right because neither has crossed the date line.  If the observer in American Samoa travels to meet his partner at Tonga, he will be forced (by convention) to adjust his clock from 'Monday' to 'Tuesday'.  If the observer at Tonga travels to American Samoa, he will be forced to adjust his clock from 'Tuesday' to 'Monday'.  This is what Phileas Fogg didn't realize: at some point during the trip, convention says he stepped across the line from Tuesday into Monday.  Of course, we all know how that worked out: he realizes his error just in time to complete the trip according to the wager he made 80 days prior.

(If we go on that cruise, we will 'lose' a day just after leaving American Samoa — then gain it back and lose it again as the ship weaves back and forth across the line — and not get it back until we return to the U.S. at the end of the cruise.)

 

The Glass Mountain

 

When I was growing up, CBS-TV (channel 2) in NY offered "Picture For A Sunday Afternoon" at 1pm or 2pm, and they would deliver two movies (the second was billed as "The Early Show") until 5pm or 6pm after which there was news followed by the prime-time lineup.

"Picture For A Sunday Afternoon" used a hauntingly beautiful theme that stuck in my head for years and years.  One day as I was walking down a corridor at IBM in White Plains casually whistling this music, a young man popped into the hallway from his office.  "Is that 'The Legend of the Glass Mountain'?" he asked.  I shrugged.  I had no idea what it was called.  It turned out that he was right.

Years later when I worked for Fawcett Publications (a division of CBS), I called down to the music library at Black Rock, the CBS headquarters in NYC, and spoke to one of the archivists.  All he could tell me was that, yes, the music was 'The Legend of the Glass Mountain', and, no, he didn't have it on record or tape and didn't know where it might be found.

Years passed.  I finally located — on this new-fangled internet — a CD version, and I ordered it shipped to me.  It remains one of my favorite discs.  It was from that disc I learned the composer's name:  Nino Rota.

'Who?' you might ask.  Nino Rota.  Between 1933 and 1979 when he died, Rota scored 150 films, working most often with Federico Fellini.  In fact, from about 1950 onward, Rota scored every Fellini film including La Strada, 8½, and Juliet of the Spirits.  He wrote the music for the first two 'Godfather' films as well as Franco Zefirelli's Romeo and Juliet and the 1978 'Death on the Nile'.  His musical output was phenomenal.  He could write — and did write — music in almost any style you can name from casual to classical.  People know Johann Pachelbel from the one piece that ever became a hit;  they don't know Rota, a real musical genius, from Adam.

You should fix that.

Anyway, I just found a DVD copy of the movie, The Glass Mountain, for which Rota wrote that hauntingly beautiful melody, and I'm looking forward to watching it even if it did only get 3½ stars.

 

Update: The Glass Mountain is a beautiful love story worth much more than a measly 3½ stars.

 

Memories of days in black and white

Eureka!

Out there on YouTube I found days... no, WEEKS of episodes from "Have Gun, Will Travel" (1957 ff), all well beyond their copyright date.

Just thought you'd like to know...