My everyday wristwatch is a beautiful leather-banded Laco aviator, made in Germany.
Besides the Arabic hour and minute numerals common to most watches, it features a small window showing calendar information: the day of the month rendered as another Arabic numeral alongside an abbreviation of the German name for the particular day of the week.
For example, today is 25th and it's a Tuesday, Dienstag in German, which my watch displays as '25 DIE.'
Every Tuesday there is a different death toll.
The month begins with only a handful of deaths but the body count grows remorselessly as the weeks pass. Fortunately, the fatalities never exceed thirty-one. I don't know how I could cope with the horror if there were eighty days in September, April, June, and November, and eight-one in the all the rest except February.
Of course, I still dread any leap year Tuesday. You think the killing spree is over in the low-twenties, but then, boom, another grave needs to be dug: Rest in peace the Tuesday twenty-nine.
I don't know. Perhaps I should just buy a basic Timex with a nylon NATO band. Wearing such a simple watch I could check to see if it's lunchtime without being confronted by a list of the fallen.
So auf wiedersehen classy German timepiece, but only on Tuesdays.
