YULtide greetings from Leprechaun Land

YULtide greetings from Leprechaun Land
via a narrow space in Greenwich

After I went Wolfie, John Stewart wrote to me: "Would that be GMT? I observed Algol at a minimum 8 minutes later".

No, John, I live in the wilds of West Cork. We keep Leprechaun Time. If you will observe my Citizen Navihawk below, you will discover that Leprechaun Time, which we reluctantly admit is presently the same as British Summer Time, is one hour behind of GMT or UTC as the politically correct now call it. So, when it is 21:51 in deepest (but very civilized) West Cork, on the narrow line in Greenwich it is 20:51 and in your neck of the woods in Eastern Canada (YUL is the aeronautical callsign for Montreal) it is 16:51.

The Citizen Navihawk is the most accomplished "complications" watch ever sold to the general public. The C300 movement has a grand perpetual date (it even knows the x000 dates are not leap years), time in all the time zones with independent summer time adjustment, three independent alarms which can be set in any time zone, a chronograph with 24hr accumulators, a split laptimer, a countdown timer and, in the best versions, an E6B rotary flight computer on the slide rule bezel. If only it had a moonphase for decoration and a halfhour time zone for my other home in Adelaide in South Australia, it would be perfect. The model that replaced the Navihawk, the Skyhawk, has battery-less EcoDrive but misses several of the refinements of the Navihawk, and has miserably small digital windows: on a watch to be worn by active sportsmen, every number should be readable at a glance, which the Navi manages just, but brilliantly. This one is not the famous Blue Angels version, of which I had two, but the display sample of an intended limited production titanium version for Germany that didn't go into production; those few which reached the market were made with red rather than the yellow highlights shown on mine. This is my everyday watch, worn on a 24mm rubber strap with cutouts to make it fit. I don't believe in "collectors" hoarding rare commodities simply because they are rare. If you own something good, you should use it.

What John means by Algol is not the nerd's triple-confusion computer programming language that cannot make up its mind which version it wants to be, but a star in the constellation Perseus, also known as the Demon Winking Star. Algol is a moderately bright double or (probably) triple star. It is remarkable in that every 68.75 hours its light dims suddenly for several hours before returning equally quickly to its former brightness. The change can be seen with the naked eye. It is worth looking out for. John is making a pun on me going Wolfie at the full moon before it wanes...