Word: quartz
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...like Chinatown and Chariots of Fire. They also show up with some regularity in fashion layouts of Giorgio Armani, Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein. The oldtimers first started to become salable, however, with the late '70s interest in retro clothes and in reaction to the flood of maddeningly accurate quartz and digital models available at the local pharmacy. "You can get a wafer-thin watch that keeps perfect time for $20 at a dime store," scoffs Sig Shonholtz, who runs the Second Time Around Watch Co. in Los Angeles. "So what else is there? The only thing left is backlash...
Manuals for smaller, less expensive items can also be frustrating. Instructions for a Pulsar digital quartz watch ($59) go on for 13 pages before telling how to set the time. One Hewlett-Packard financial calculator ($110) comes with an operating booklet that runs to 246 pages of small type. The company supplements that with a 170-page training guide that sells for $15. "People have said we should do something like this for all our manuals," observes Janet Cryer, who wrote the guide...
...industrial countries recently negotiated numerous "voluntary" agreements to limit commerce. The European Community, for example, promised the U.S. to hold steel exports to an average of only 5.4% of the American market. Europe won assurances from the Japanese that they would restrain exports of autos, light trucks, quartz watches, hi-fi equipment, computer-controlled machine tools and television tubes. Japan also agreed to put a 1.68 million ceiling on its auto shipments to the U.S. for the third straight year. The Geneva-based trade organization GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) estimates that roughly half of world commerce...
...elegant of all. It is in the Cooper-Hewitt show and may be worth $1 million. Presented to his wife Alexandra Fyodorovna by Nicholas II in 1914, the 3⅝-in.-high egg is made of intertwining gold belts and platinum mesh set with diamonds, sapphires, rubies, emeralds, topaz, quartz and garnets. The surprise inside is an oval plaque of gold, pearl and enamel on which are painted the profiles of the five royal children, all of whom were to be shot, along with their parents, by the Bolsheviks...
...earth supposedly keeps one general clock and calendar as it twirls in a universe precisely machined. The minute pulses of quartz vibrating on the wrist imitate the clockwork of the planets. We stripe the globe with time zones. Time is the most predictable of abstractions, a one-directional flow that carries the universe along with its impartial and inexorable wave. The discovery of measurable time is one of the early signs of civilization, like literacy and cosmetics. Time may be mysterious, but it also possesses an admirable objective purity, a sort of narrative genius, like Tolstoy...