I bought a sundial. With recent power outages, I was tired of seeing all the 12:00s on every digital clock in the house and then having to reset them. At least with a sundial, there’s no resetting no matter how many times the power goes kaput.
I’ve had some experience with sundials. After constantly forgetting to wind my watch, I got a pocket sundial. It worked well, but the gnomon (which comes from the Greek word “œq<n$x∂?pzƒ” and means “pointy thing that sticks up to make a shadow”), kept ripping through my pants pocket. I won’t even tell you how painful it was if the sundial happened to flip in the opposite direction in my pocket. After replacing many slacks and bandaging the numerous holes poked in sensitive areas of my personal body, I bought a wrist sundial. The salesman told me it would be accurate as long as it was level, with the gnomon always pointed to the north and parallel to the axis of the Earth’s rotation. Unfortunately, I skimped and bought a cheap model, mass-produced in China, and the gnomon’s shadow, which resembled an egg roll, didn’t line up with the hour indicators. It was always six minutes slow and it couldn’t be adjusted for daylight savings time.
The earliest sundials known were from the ancient Egyptians. They were the pocket type, discovered by archaeologists when the gnomons were found poking through the bandages of mummies. These were quite impractical, because the mummies were tightly wrapped and unable to reach into their pockets. The ancient Greeks must have had a lot of time on their hands because they were constantly developing better sundials to determine how much time was actually on their hands, probably to see if it could be better used elsewhere, maybe to construct a large wooden horse for their friends, the Trojans, something that had been on their back-burner for a long time. Astronomer Aristarchus of Samos is credited with developing the first sundial for the Greeks. It was made from a block of stone. Not to be outdone by this lame attempt of Aristar’s, Andronicus of Cyrrhus built a time tower called the Horologium, which means “Not just another lame attempt to make a sundial.”
According to the directions included with the sundial I got for my yard, it’s quite simple to set up. I was all set to purchase a moondial to tell time after sundown, but fortunately, before I handed over my cash to the garden store clerk, I realized that crazy moon is always in a different place, sometimes no place, and even shows up in the daytime. All this makes moondials highly-inaccurate and a bad investment, especially those made in China.
Anyway, all I need to do to have my sundial set perfectly is find the exact latitude of my backyard, the precise vertical direction in which to place the gnomon as determined by a plumb bob, and the direction of true north. The final calculation is to figure mathematically how many pancakes it takes to fill a doghouse. After that, I’m to go into the house, start flipping flapjacks and forget about telling time with the sundial.