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 is a writer and technologist who has been putting his opinions online since 1995. He believes in three inviolable human rights: life, liberty, and property. He is a Catholic Christian who worships the trinitarian God described in the Nicene Creed. Scott is a husband, nerd, pet lover, and AMC/Jeep enthusiast with a B.S. degree in public administration from George Mason University.

Quotes

Our world rewards action over inaction, at least in the average sense . . . the person who doesn’t try anything at all is unlikely to succeed.

All the great religions contain wise prescriptions relating to the conduct of life, which hold good now as they did when they were promulgated.

God alone is the inciter and guarantor of freedom. He is the only guarantor.

‘Chance’ is nothing but an expression of human ignorance. We don’t know the reasons and causes and design of all things, because we are not God.

There are always values that some people think worthy enough that other people should have to pay for them—but not worthy enough that they should have to pay for them themselves.

One has not only a legal, but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.

It is childlike thinking to insist in all cases that the people who cause problems are the only people who should solve them.

This country has come to feel the same when Congress is in session as when the baby gets hold of a hammer.

Democracy loosens social ties, but it draws the ties of nature more tight; it brings kindred more closely together, whilst it places the various members of the community more widely apart.

Always do right; this will gratify some people and astonish the rest.

Solid reasoned discourse, including philosophy and theology, does not need quantification from exact science to support it, since those discourses ought to be able to stand on their own merit.

War against a foreign country only happens when the moneyed classes think they are going to profit from it.

The difference between the Republicans and the Democrats is that the Democrats let the poor be corrupt, too.

How wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. . . . We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don’t know.

The United States has lasted well more than two-hundred years, but it is still young in the grand scheme of things. The apathy of the people can still be its downfall.

And he who lives a hundred years, idle and weak, a life of one day is better if a man has attained firm strength.

The more an owner, for his advantage, opens up his property for use by the public in general, the more do his rights become circumscribed by the statutory and constitutional rights of those who use it.

It took man thousands of years to put words down on paper, and his lawyers still wish he wouldn’t.

Freedom engenders private animosities, but despotism gives birth to general indifference.

If men could only know each other, they would never either idolize or hate.