As Long As Bonanza And Part Of Bewitched

      One day last week, I was hanging around with someone and they asked me how much longer I was going to continue to hang around like that.
   The answer was "about an hour and twenty minutes". There was a brief exchange about how long this actually was and then, to be clearer (and cognizant at the same time as to this person's age and life experience), I said, "About as long as Bonanza and part of Bewitched."
   There you have it, two new units of time!
   I do this a lot, and mostly with myself. If I know I need to hang around and wait for an hour for something to occur (and because I am of a certain vintage), I usually visualize myself plopped in front of a T.V. screen somewhere, watching Bonanza or Ed Sullivan or Perry Mason. If I only need to wait half an hour then it could be Bewitched or The Flintstones or maybe even the Dick Van Dyke Show. God forbid I need to wait an hour and a half so then I imagine "The Virginian". Any much longer than that and I end up turning to movies like "Cleopatra" or "Gone With The Wind"!
   Of course, I make reference to an age when you had no choice but to watch commercials (or head to the bathroom) during the course of a show and that added up to the half-hour, hour, or ninety minutes. Nowadays, with the advent of a PVR's  ability to pause, rewind and fast/forward, a show can be as long or short as you'd like it to be. You can go to the bathroom and cook a roast, if you want. Hell, you can go to the bathroom and then go on freakin' holidays, for that matter, before the show starts up again!
   So, lost on a new generation is the ability to gauge time by T.V. show length!
   While we're on the subject of gauging time, there was a day when, if someone asked you what time it was, you would look at your watch or the clock on the wall and say something like it's half past three or it's about a quarter to ten or I've got about twenty after two. There was a certain amount of imprecision around phrases like those but they still did the trick.

Do you prefer THIS.....

   These days, however, the advent of digital clocks and timepieces has taken away any pre-existing inconsequential inaccuracies and has almost forced us to tell the other person exactly what time it is. Whether they wanted to know, or not.

...or THIS?

   Whereas before you might have looked at the rough position of the minute hand on the clock and it's about twenty after two, nowadays you're going to look at your digital device and say well, I've got two twenty-two. Which quite frequently might be followed by oops, now it's two twenty-THREE, and so on. No more sneaking upstairs at round about one when, in fact, it was actually one twenty nine...
   So that was my little "getting old", "the times, they are a-changin' " rant, hope you're not tired of them by now! And, frankly, I really don't give a damn whether the clockface is "sweep" or "digital" as long as it's "large"!