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Rolex Datejust 41

Ramblings

A fine and expensive timepiece.


The Rolex 41 Datejust 16300

A year or so ago I wrote in disgust about my abandonment of Patek Philippe wristwatches and their replacement with a dirt cheap Seiko Solar. That Seiko is recommended every bit as much today as is my warning to steer away from Pateks. These may be the most elegant and desired of watches but they are like Jaguar cars of old. You need two. One on your wrist and the other in for service. In fact, it looks like you need two service men, in case one breaks down, and you can bet they are nowhere to be found in the US of A. It’s off to Geneva and many months of waiting, during which time your inquiries are disregarded.

So with the proceeds of the Nautilus and the Golden Ellipse burning a hole in my pocket, it was just a question of waiting for the wounds to heal after decades of association with the marque. The healing time was used for some serious research into alternatives.

And when the withdrawal symptoms faded with the coming of the new year I looked to a brand I though would never grace (darken?) my wrist, Rolex.

Frankly, all that bling and association with guys named Tony left me cold. Not my thing. While I do believe a good whacking beats our legal system as often as not, it’s not an activity with which I want to be associated.


…. guys named Tony….

But there are Rolexes and there are Rolexes as a glance at their extensive offerings confirms. As I wanted a classic, simple watch my attention fell on the Datejust, first offered in 1945 and the first watch with a date display. After a while Rolex added the ‘cyclops’ date magnifier, 2.5x unlike the 1.5x found elsewhere, and that was a must for these aging eyes. The look is simple, almost severe, ‘no gold’ options abound and you can even side step that awful machined bezel which screams ‘look at me’. So I went for a plain steel model with a smooth bezel and made sure it came with the gorgeous Jubilee bracelet – the one with the three rows of fine, polished links in the center in contrast to the single link of the clunkier Oyster alternative – and plunked down a (small) percentage of the proceeds from the Pateks. This is the Datejust 41 model, their latest, and obsoletes the thicker and clunkier Datejust II, which is more reminiscent of the fat onions of old. Roman numerals? You bet. An essential option on my timepieces. The trade-off is that the Roman numerals dial has no luminosity. If that is a desired feature, you have to go with the stick hour markers and stick luminous hands.

While Rolex claims a 41mm bezel diameter, that is a lie. It’s actually 40.1mm:


Little lies.

No matter. It looks just right on my 7 3/4″ circumference wrist and more discreet than some of the modern monsters from the competition.

And while silver hands on a white background suggest poor readability, tilt the wrist a few degrees and the contrast is striking, courtesy of the facets on the hands:


No lack of contrast

The watch can be ‘hacked’, meaning the second hand can be stopped for precise alignment with Apple Time, and my early readings suggest it is losing 1.0 seconds a day. Compare that with the quartz magic of the Seiko which gains 2 seconds …. a month! The Rolex is automatic and the power reserve a generous 70 hours. The movement is made in house, unlike with most Swiss brands who buy in movements from mass market makers. Stated differently, your are buying a packaging and marketing exercise with those, not a statement of mechanical originality. You want your Porsche 911 with a Chevy motor?

A great deal of thought has gone into the making of this timepiece. Look at the perfect integration of that gorgeous bracelet with the lugs and body:


Perfect integration of band and lugs

And the attention is not all on the surface, as this detail of the clasp’s design and finish discloses:


Clasp detail

So for those seeking a mechanical watch which will never really be an heirloom – in the sense of a Patek Philippe or Audemars Piguet – but which nevertheless boasts high standards of design and execution, and if a 2 seconds a day accuracy is acceptable, add the Rolex Datejust to your list. Waterproofing is good to 100 meters below the surface.

If you want a Rolex with a stopwatch function, you should look at the Daytona model. This will run you 2 to 3 times as much as the Datejust, above, and be prepared to add 50-70% to prices on the Rolex website for any model. No jeweler will offer you those prices. Excuses will include “supply chain”, “sunken delivery ship”, “the European war”, “the pandemic”, “inflation”, and so on.

Provenance? Churchill was gifted #100,000, though like a true Victorian he preferred his Breguet pocket watch. Ike got #150,000 and the watch even made an appearance on the cover of Life magazine along with its distinguished wearer, in 1952. Elvis got a free one, but the number is unknown and he probably bought a few dozen out of his own pocket to give his closest hangers on. The Datejust has a distinguished history and has been around almost 80 years, so the kinks will have been well and truly ironed out by now. Plus the extensive USA dealer and servicing network means it’s not off to the land of the Gnomes of Zurich (Nazi and Russkie bankers to you) every time something goes wrong. This is a Swiss product after all and its reliability is most likely like that of a Mercedes. Stated differently, it’s no Toyota/Seiko.

Purchase the watch new from an authorized US dealer and it comes with a five year factory warranty.

For an interesting review of the history of the magnificent Jubilee bracelet, click here.

Update May 18, 2022 – after one month of operation:

The Datejust has lost 23 seconds in 30 days at a constant rate. This is comfortably inside the stated +/- 2 seconds a day specification. When resetting the date every two months for short months I will set the watch 23 seconds fast for minimum mean error across a two month period.

The bracelet has a tool less length adjustment feature allowing a 5mm change in length by clipping or unclipping one link inside the clasp. I find this to be most useful. My wrist shrinks during the day so I shorten the bracelet around noon for a perfect fit at all times. Very handy.

Update June 30, 2022 – after 72 days of operation:

July 1st will be the first time I have had to reset the date at which point I will also “hack“ the second hand to get the lowest error rate through the next reset, which will be on October 1st. For those 72 days, the average daily error rate sees the Datejust running just 0.4 seconds slow per day. That is excellent for a purely mechanical device.

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel

Movies

The 1950s revisited.


Rachel Brosnahan, Dior, DC3. Click the image.

Ike was in the Oval Office or, more correctly, on the putting green, supervising the greatest economic boom the country had ever experienced. That boom also brought growing economic equality to Americans, (nowhere to be seen today), and while Ike was soon to be replaced with the glamour of JFK – an attribute notably missing from the old soldier’s bag of tricks – there was no better time to be an American.

The winding down of the war machine saw huge amounts of disposable income directed to new housing and new cars in the New World. The outhouse and the clothing line had given way to the two car garage and new homes replete with modern conveniences like clothes washers, dishwashers and freezers. Affordable air-conditioning was a given. Goodness knows, it was an essential everywhere except San Francisco. America had yet to lose a foreign war and reveled in its global success, with General Electric stock in every investment portfolio. Pictures were taken on Kodak film with Kodak cameras and no one had heard of Honda or Toyota. They were still so much nuclear waste.

Madison Avenue was on a roll, and every hope could be fulfilled with a gallon of dirt cheap high test and a pack of Marlboros. After all, driving was patriotic and doctors assured Americans that smoking was good for their health. Two annual vacations had become an entitlement, and if you were east coast and Jewish that meant summer in the Catskills, which came with wonderful food, fabulous weather and even better comedians. The happening places were Grossingers and the Concord, no Gentiles admitted.


Generally confused, always understated, the wonderful Tony Shaloub is the father.

This is the era which the Amazon production “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel“ recreates accurately, albeit seen through the eyes of a wealthy, upper class (the terms are synonymous in America) young Jewish woman who, bizarrely, decides that her future lies as a standup comedian in a world exclusively populated by potty mouthed males. After all, if your topics of choice are your parents, food and sex, a potty mouth probably comes in handy. The most famous stand up class member was one Lenny Bruce, who spent more time in jail for use of obscene language on the stage than he did on the stage itself. Wiser heads like that of Woody Allen made long-term careers from this avocation, franchising natural writing and performing skills into the movies, and avoided dying aged 41 from a drug overdose. Bruce no longer sounds funny today, whereas Allen – no potty mouth required – just moves from strength to strength.

The Maisel show is an illustration of where the power in movie production lies today. With infinitely wealthy studios like Amazon, Apple, Netflix and HBO, most of which did not exist until recently, the acting profession has spotted that the future lies in streaming and the small screen, not the Covid-ridden theater parlor of old with its $7 Cokes, long drives and wasted real estate. While old Hollywood focuses on the transgender set as the topic of the day, its gross forever falling along with its Oscar audience, streaming TV has realized that the real money is to be found on the domestic couch. And it does not have to feature guys who wants to get into the ladies’ rocker room under false pretenses. Better that annuity of monthly streaming charges than the crapshoot which is the box office.


The always elegant Marin Hinkel as the mother.

And if you are a fan of 1950s American culture, love sharp-edged Jewish humor and revel in the greatest designer clothing civilization has ever seen, then the Mrs. Maisel show is a wonder not to be missed. While women were still expected to be barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen in the 1950s, the likes of Dior, Chanel, Balenciaga, Givenchy and Fath saw to it that the promise of liberation was not far away, with abundant volumes of pastel colored cloth supported by multitudinous layers of petticoat, all topped with outrageous hats. Of course, a wealthy spouse or a trust fund were requirements for the enjoyment of this haute couture but for those who could afford them women simply looked great in these outfits, and it would be hard to look better than the star of the show, Rachel Brosnahan. She may be forced into girdles and corsets now and then, but goodness knows, her natural figure hardly needs those. And boy, does she look good.

Unbelievable as the plot line may seem, the scriptwriting sparkles and after four seasons refuses to get old. One key reason for this is the strength of the supporting cast, with wonderfully understated comedic performances from Tony Shalhoub as Maisel’s father and from the ever elegant and gorgeous Marin Hinkle as her mother. Shalhoub‘s character is a mathematics professor at Columbia and Hinkle’s spent her formative years in Paris. In the modern world, these people would most certainly not be living in the Midwest, questioning their gender identity.

If you appreciate rapidly delivered verbal humor, perfect period recreations – there are shows in Las Vegas, the Catskills and Miami in addition to the core setting of Manhattan – and the most gorgeous fashions you’ve ever seen, do not miss this. And, yes, Luke Kirby as Lenny Bruce is pitch perfect, if less zonked out on amphetamines than the original. Maisel’s twenty Emmys, and counting, testify to the show’s success.

To read more about the clothier and her imitation game, click here.

Hide My Email

iPhone

Another great privacy enhancement from Apple.

Sign up for a new online service and the one thing you can be almost certain of is that next day’s email inbox will be inundated with spam. The reason is that the scummy vendor of the service you just signed up for – and most are scummy – just sold your email address to some other bottom feeder.

The other day I was signing up to a streaming service and I knew that these predators would immediately sell my email address. It’s lost somewhere in the ‘Terms of Service’ fine print which the scummy vendor had his scummy laywers write. Calling this a ‘service’ is like claiming the invasion of Ukraine was a denazification move.

Anyway, as I moved the cursor to the email field, iOS on my iPhone asked whether I wanted to hide my email, and I replied ‘Yes’. It issued me a fake email address which will be the one the scummy vendor sees and the one I signed up with …. immediately to be sold. The snag for Mr. Scummy is that anyone he sells this fake email to who emails me will have that email bounced as only emails from the original vendor will be filtered through to my inbox, using my regular email address which is visible only to Apple. And, indeed, that’s what happened – one confirming email from Mr. Scummy and nothing from his scummy pals.


Beating Mr. Scummy. Click the image for the full explanation from Apple.

Recommended for all your sign-ups. As a default assume that anytime you enter your email online that it will be sold – unless the vendor is Apple.

iOS 15.4 improvements

iPhone

Finally!

One of the more obvious enhancements in iOS 15.4 for the iPhone is the ability conferred on FaceID which allows unlocking of the phone while wearing a mask. It works well and is very fast, though sadly it’s restricted to iPhone 12 and later. I still stubbornly insist on wearing a mask in the land of SUVs and gun rights, so this is nice to have in the supermarket.

But a relatively unsung enhancement – only 15 years after the introduction of the iPhone – is the added provision of nested mailboxes in Mail, denoted by the arrow. Click the arrowed item and the underlying mailboxes are revealed. For one who adopts fairly structured mail storage methods, this is huge, as my large number of mailboxes has now become quickly accessible, just as on the desktop OS:


Nested mailboxes.

The other very significant enhancement which has gone largely unremarked is the great improvement in voice recognition. For a device with a small screen and a near useless keyboard, the error rate in recognizing spoken words has fallen by an order of magnitude. What was borderline useless is now suddenly quite competent. As an example, I dictated an email with the names of the last six despots ruling the Russkies* and voice recognition got every one right!

iOS 15.4 is a significant improvement, for these issues alone.

* I was making the point that assassination is a remote hope, and that the first five had all died in their beds, and the sixth is likely to. Their leaders may whack subordinates with impunity, but seem to survive just fine.

A cool iPhone case

iPhone

Thank you, Emily!


The coolest iPhone case on the planet. Click the image.

Not a single ‘control’ on this iPhone case does anything, but does it look cool or what? I saw it in the light-as-champagne Netflix show ‘Emily in Paris’ starring the gorgeous Lily Collins and nothing is calculated to put you in a better mood. The world’s most beautiful city with a gorgeous British/American girl. And no ordinary girl, as her dad is none other than rocker Phil Collins. The apple does not fall far from the tree when it comes to talent, though Lily’s looks are a step up from Phil’s!