At the Tone, the Time Will Be . . .

Posted March 8, 2011, 11:10 p.m.

At some point in my northern Virginia childhood, I discovered that I could call 844-1212 and find out exactly what time it was. “At the tone, the time will be 11:41pm and ten seconds . . . (beep).” Around the same time, I also learned that dialing 936-1212 would get you a free, recorded weather report.

These services were provided by C&P Telephone, which was eventually subsumed into Bell Atlantic, and then into Verizon. Against all odds, both services survived from 1939 to present. Long after my preferred weather source moved to CompuServe and then to various Internet sources, you could still get a report from (703) 936-1212. Long after we all got cell phones that synced with accurate tower time automatically, you could still call (703) 844-1212 and get that archaic, soothing voice and tone.

If you call those numbers now, you still get those age-old recorded services . . . but the weather report is preceded by a glib message indicating that Verizon’s time and weather services will cease to exist on June 1 of this year. Such is the price of progress, but I’m always kind-of sad to see these kinds of things go.

Scott Bradford has been putting his opinions on his website since 1995—before most people knew what a website was. He has been a professional web developer in the public- and private-sector for over twenty years. He is an independent constitutional conservative who believes in human rights and limited government, and a Catholic Christian whose beliefs are summarized in the Nicene Creed. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Public Administration from George Mason University. He loves Pink Floyd and can play the bass guitar . . . sort-of. He’s a husband, pet lover, amateur radio operator, and classic AMC/Jeep enthusiast.

Quotes

As natural inequality is very great, fortunes become unequal as soon as every man exerts all his faculties to get rich.

People who live their lives selfishly and at the detriment of others are often the ones who complain loudest about how badly they think they’ve been mistreated.

If you establish a censorship of the press, the tongue of the public speaker will still make itself heard, and you have only increased the mischief.

Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.

For thou didst form my inward parts, thou didst knit me together in my mother’s womb.

Look for three qualities in employees: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if they don’t have the first, the other two will kill you.

Anger is an acid that can do more harm to the vessel in which it’s stored than to anything on which it’s poured.

The laws of God, like the law of gravity, do not depend upon how I feel about them. They are inexorable, and God has willed them to be knowable, even in the absence of strong emotion or apparent miracles.

The stories we can neither ignore nor forget are unforgettable [because] they speak to something we know, but do not know that we know.

The hunger strike is a purely moral weapon. It presupposes that the jailer has not entirely lost his conscience. Or that the jailer is afraid of public opinion.

The rules are simple: they lie to us, we know they’re lying, they know we know they’re lying but they keep lying anyway, and we keep pretending to believe them.

One can literally drive a person to death with a trade-union meeting!

Let falsehood enter the world, let it even reign in the world—but not with my help.

The Light can shine in darkness, but the darkness does not comprehend it.

Almighty God would in no wise permit evil to exist in His works, unless He were so almighty and so good as to produce good even from evil.

If the rights of the meek are to be preserved and the peace is to be enforced, the meek must stay strong. There is a critical moral difference between the peacemakers and the pacifists.

It was always accounted a virtue in a man to love his country. With us it is now something more than a virtue. It is a necessity.

Said he, ‘We never fight the people we trade with.’ I thought to myself, ‘Well, we certainly had to fight Japan in spite of all the oil and scrap iron we sold her just before World War II.’ It did not seem possible that this famous international banker would have forgotten such an elementary lesson so quickly.

Our liberty depends on the freedom of the press, and that cannot be limited without being lost.

Piety requires us to honor truth above our friends.