Say hello to my little friend.

He is a "dual time" watch. Usually this is accomplished by adding a second hour "hand" - be it a "UTC" complication that shows you Greenwich Mean Time or a bezel you can rotate that gives you a second set of hours. My friend Ardath, on the other hand...

So this is effectively two independent watches. Which is an odd thing to do. What's more, they're good watches. Cheap, weird case be damned, those are 21-jewel ladies' movements with shock protection and chatons on the 2nd and third wheels.

I bought this little guy for $20 on Saturday. I'd never heard of Ardath either. So I poke around on eBay and find that it's not really a $20 watch. I also find that they had some with a seconds hand and a calendar which, for ladies' movements, is gettin' fancy.

That half the watch is in Arabic is a clue, but not necessarily a great one. One of my favorite brands is Universal Geneve, which was also a favorite of Hosni Mubarak, Saddam Hussein And Donald Trump. All sorts of strange things were made for "the sandbox" prior to "the sandbox" letting you know they didn't appreciate your Orientalist pejoratives.

And for those of us who grew up in the '80s, our textbooks were often from the '70s and '60s. Most of our maps had "North Vietnam" on them. And the text books generally had a time zone map in 'em, and for Saudi Arabia it just sort of had an asterisk. No real info, just "Saudi time." So we go digging.

Until 1968 the country used Arabic time, in which clocks were set to midnight at sundown. Because of confusion between various other systems also used in the kingdom, the standardized use of a time zone was established.

Yeah, mutherfucker. Wherever you are in the Kingdom of Saud, when the sun goes down it's midnight.

Just how complicated this could be was illustrated a couple of years back when an English lady of long residence in Jiddah sat down to write three invitations to a summer dinner party. One going to a Saudi Arab merchant, began "My husband and I would like you to join us for dinner at 12:30." Another, going to an airline pilot, read "... for dinner at 8:00." The third, to an American businessman, said "... dinner at 6:30." Yet, just after sunset on the appointed evening all three guests, each with a wristwatch showing a different hour, arrived within minutes of each other, dined well and later spent a leisurely evening chatting beside a lighted swimming pool—thanks to the cleverness of a hostess who knew that being on time depended very much on whose watch you were watching.

Modernity is never equally distributed.