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Sections Home Page Local News AP News Archives Business Classifieds Event Calendar Forums Life Opinion Obituaries Photo Gallery Since We Asked Sports Tempo Weather Special Coverage 2006 Britt Festivals --> Shop Our Valley AutoFinder HomeFinder JobFinder Search Our Valley Special Sections Homelife Magazine Joy Magazine Readers Choice 2006 Oregon Golf Info Oregon Wine Info Our Valley Other Publications Local Links Ashland News eSouthernOregon Newspapers In Education Personals Moving Here Movie Listings TV Listings Volunteer Customer Service Advertise With Us Media Kit Place Classified Ad Contact Us FAQ's Home Delivery Site Map --> Email Story to a Friend August 13, 2006 Time flies when you have fun By BILL VARBLE Mail Tribune It's weird how we remain slaves to the clock, that symbol of an old-fashioned, Newtonian universe, in our postmodern world of quarks, multi-dimensional spacetime and lite beer. Our forbears' notion of time was linear, a one-dimensional something that's the same everywhere, stretching from a remote past like a very long piece of capellini. That went out the window with Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity in 1915, along with some laundry Einstein's wife, Mileva, hadn't folded it in the way the fussy scientist insisted on, prompting a hissy fit in which he accused Mileva of being cosmologically inconstant. The item that put us in mind of the tyranny of time came the other day from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. OSF plays will start at 8 p.m. instead of 8:30 beginning Tuesday. That's how the season begins, but it switches to the later hours with the opening of the outdoor stage in June. An OSF spokesman said an audience survey "indicated a very strong desire for OSF to move its curtain times earlier." Advertisement Duh. It's bad enough having to kill an hour after a 6 p.m. dinner without that extra half-hour during which the food settles and the brain turns to molasses. You know it will be after midnight when you get home, and in June the birds will start in at about 4:30 a.m. "Because of sunset times and attendant lighting considerations in the Elizabethan theatre," the spokesman said, "we cannot do a wholesale abandonment of the 8:30 start times in the summer, but we have decided to revert to 8 pm a bit earlier." To which I say, woo-hoo! In fact, I'd support wholesale abandonment. It's not dark at 8:30 either. The lights would kick in a half-hour farther into the play, like a concert where the light show starts after dark, or a twi-night doubleheader. Don't get me started on movie times. You get there for a 7 p.m. show, and you wind up having to sit through commercials. You have been suckered into paying money, and submitting to the tyranny of time, to watch commercials! Just when you're ready to go find somebody to complain to or pummel, there's a darkening and a flourish, and for the next 15 minutes you're subjected to the sex/violence/car-chase scenes of six upcoming movies with the sound turned up to 11 on a 10-point system. Public meetings wield their own kinds of time tyranny. From about 7 a.m. to midnight, there's a meeting going on somewhere, almost every day. Hey, try to change the time, people turn on you. Two things you don't mess with in civic life are the seating and the time. The longest event I ever sat through was an arbitration session, Ashland teachers versus the school district, in April of 1987. It went all day, then it went all night. It was the night Sugar Ray Leonard got a controversial decision over Marvin Hagler, and details were fed round by round to those of us unlucky enough to be there. It was clear each side was using time as a weapon to try to break the other's will, like Hagler trying to corner and pound on Leonard. Press conference times are another can of worms. No reporter likes being spoon-fed. Worse yet for print folks is to have the non-event timed for the evening TV news so that the morning paper looks stale. In Washington, D.C. or Salem or wherever they try to bury bad news by releasing it when it will attract the least attention, e.g., the black hole, Friday afternoon. Which brings us full circle. Because inside a black hole the laws of physics break down, and even time itself must come to an end. If you find yourself near a black hole, my advice is to find a wormhole to make your escape. Holes stem from a warping of spacetime that could make time travel possible. I've often wished for a wormhole when the second act of a play has lost its way and the snorers are out, just jump in that puppy like Capt. Kirk and time-travel to a nearby future. But there might be bugs or recalls or whatever. With my luck I'd come out in an all-day Saturday study session of the sewer commission's citizen advisory committee. It's what's called doing time. Reach reporter Bill Varble at 776-4478 or e-mail [email protected] . Mail Tribune Home | Local News | Sports | Business | Obituaries | Life | Opinion AP News | Archives | Site Map | Community | Classified Copyright © 1997-2006 Mail Tribune, Inc. All rights reserved. Privacy Policy | Terms & Conditions | Website Feedback online casinos news Home Security Systems California Casinos Men's Clothing Southern Oregon Loans --> GMAT Prep Fundraisers Send Flowers Entertainment Guide --> Casinos Canada Trunks, Footlocker Online Casino Reviews Advertisement s Advertisement