Thursday, November 09, 2006

29.10.06 merton time ceremony

 

Merton's peaceful precincts are disturbed once a year by the (in)famous Time Ceremony, when students, dressed in formal sub-fusc, walk backwards around Fellows' Quad drinking port. Traditionally participants also hold candles but in recent years this practice has been dropped, and many students have now adopted the habit of linking arms and twirling around at each corner of the quad. The purpose is ostensibly to maintain the integrity of the space-time continuum during the transition from British Summer Time to Greenwich Mean Time which occurs in the early hours of the last Sunday in October. There are two toasts associated with the ceremony, the first is "to good old time" whilst the second is "long live the counter revolution!".

– “Merton Time Ceremony” Wikipedia, 29 October 2006

 

Sadly, I am so busy that I am posting highlights of last weekend’s activities a week and a half late.  Ok, that makes it two weekends ago.  Sigh. Sigh. Sigh. 

 

The actual story of the Merton Time Ceremony is somewhat lost to history, and I suspect, to no small degree of embarrassment.  The founders claim lots of things, but specifically that …

The purpose and effect of this is to create a localised area in which natural time stands still for one hour, in the hope that into this void of depressed natural time thus created will flow sufficient natural time from other areas to nearly equalise civil time throughout the country within one revolution of the Earth, thus reducing  by several seconds the time it would otherwise take nature and mankind to re-adapt their diurnal cycle after an abrupt ‘stationary jet-lag’”. 

…and that is the layman’s version.  Check out “lots of things” above to see the actual sciency version.  Here is a three part layman’s layman interpretation of what really is (and was) going on.

What It Is

Clocks get turned back every year in the fall, the founders thought they could “fix” space/time by walking backwards for 1 hour during the switch.  Because it’s Merton and Oxford, that means drunk and wearing subfusc.

 What It Was

I can only speculate on this, but I think that what REALLY happened was the founders were big geeks with 1) too much physics on the brain and 2) nothing to do on a Saturday night.  So, they though up some absurd, semi-Pythonesque, 70’s style wacky ritual during which they could be witty in a performance art sort of way, and drunk.  And have a semi excuse for having nothing to do on a Saturday night… if they were like the rest of the student body, they would have been out disco dancing, getting loaded, and picking up on chicks.  But they weren’t: they were home trying to impress each other with how witty and science-core they could be.  Ok, I can relate to that.  There were probably about 3 people the first Time Ceremony, if the “lots of things” (above) documentation is any indication.

What it Has Become

Today, it looks like a fucked up backwards drunk subfusc Hajj.  Basically, there are hundreds of Mertonians guzzling bottles of port, linked arm in arm, walking backwards around the quad FAST.  It’s almost kind of slam-dancy.  Glass gets broken, drunks tumble over, toes get crushed, bodies get slammed into, and people get hurt.  It was totally disaster-cool, like a Primate-5 show that had gone all highbrow.  With less blood.  I didn’t get a good picture of the motion, but I have some step by step that should help clarify things...

 

Oct 012

everyone meets on the chestnut lawn just before the clocks change

 

Oct 018

filing along to the fellows tower

 

Oct 023 

down the corridor to the quadrangle

 

Oct 031

in the quadrangle

(remember, these people are all walking backwards, FAST)

 

Oct 030

see?  they’re drunk!

 

Oct 043

nothing was going to stop this guy

(notice dude in red robe on the right, a founder)

 

Oct 046

filing out after

 

Oct 056

spooky post time ceremony quad

 

Oct 052

tired tired tired e

 

 

A Word On The Founders

I didn’t meet these guys, but did see the effects of their presence on a room they had just left.  They basically came into the MCR, sat down, and refused to answer questions about the ceremony, claiming that it was all on the website.  Whatever.  They then made some crack about there being too much estrogen in the room (there were no women at Merton in the 70s, and there are lots now) and too many provincials (grad students are mostly not English, again a change from the 70s).  Then, they split.  I saw them coming out, looking a bit crusty in a junior high school science teacher sort of way, like they’d been wearing the same robes and suits and ties since the 70s.  They didn’t say anything to me, but boy oh boy did they piss off the “provincial” girls in the room!  I’m kind of sorry I missed the whole exchange: getting shit on by snooty upper-crust English is one of those “quintessential” experiences you look for when in England.  Sort of like getting camphelobacter jejueni from eating chicken sashimi in Japan, right?  Right?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

cool but late

Anonymous said...

You forgot the part where the "Scrum Master" reads out the "Sprint Backlog."

As near as I can understand it from the links you gave, leaving out that step makes it almost impossible to "recruit and retain superior talent."