I’m of two minds about ticking clocks.  On the one hand, I’ve often had to get up and rearrange my daily carry pile such that my mechanical wristwatch is on top of the heap, and thus isolated from the resonating dresser top.  And I ultimately had to remove the clock from my bathroom for the same reason. The ticking is an acoustic version of the Chinese water torture.  Especially at 3am when the Ticks… Stretch.. Out… Forever… Tick… Tick… Tick…

On the other hand, it is nice to have sources of known random noise generators in the house.  When you have a pet, or something else to make random thumps at odd intervals, it’s easy to dismiss the noises.  “Oh, it’s just the cat. *snore*”  When you no longer have said noise sources (I no longer have a cat), every sound becomes AN AXE MURDERER BREAKING INTO THE HOUSE!!!

So regular sounds -> insanity.  Irregular sounds -> sound sleep. Maybe someone needs to come up with a clock that only ticks 1 out of every 10 intervals, at random, to fill this gap. Yeah. That’s it. I think I have my new Kickstarter project.

Do you know how hard it is to find a wind-up alarm clock?

Yes, it’s exactly as hard as typing ‘wind-up alarm clock’ into Amazon.

I have an old twin-bell wind-up alarm clock. It is a thing of beauty, and the alarm would wake the dead… but the ticking is alarmingly loud. 

David began visiting junkyards and antiques stores in search of radium-coated dashboard panels or clocks. Once he found such an item, he’d chip paint from the instruments and collect it in pill vials. It was slow going until one day, driving through Clinton Township to visit his girlfriend, Heather, he noticed that his Geiger counter went wild as he passed Gloria’s Resale Boutique/Antique. The proprietor, Gloria Genette, still recalls the day when she was called at home by a store employee who said that a polite young man was anxious to buy an old table clock with a tinted green dial but wondered if she’d come down in price. She would. David bought the clock for $10. Inside he discovered a vial of radium paint left behind by a worker either accidentally or as a courtesy so that the clock’s owner could touch up the dial when it began to fade.

Ack!  It’s not an urban legend:

“Radium dials were discontinued in the late 1950′s, when it was discovered that workers who painted the dials had cancer of the jawbone, brought on by “sharpening” the brush by putting it in their mouths with the radium on it.”