Unlike that guy from Iran who dresses out of a Sears catalog, circa 1980, it is not a power I have sought, nor was I born to it, either, only to have it activated by an eclipse then frustrated by three seasons of terrible writing.  No, this was power forced upon me by myopia, mine and that of Steve Jobs.

Steve Jobs’ hobbyesque quest to put an iTunes Store Kiosk in any living room willing to pay $229 for an Apple TV has meant no clock for me. I want a clock in Front Row, Apple’s media center software, so I know when it’s time for old people like me go to bed. Sadly, Front Row has become abandaonware since the Apple TV, so I have to go the desktop to check the time.

Sure, I could have put a cheap digital clock in front of the plasma, but most clocks don’t really keep track of time. The moment they start keeping it, they start losing it. Don’t even mention Daylight Savings Time in a country that’s been urbanized for more than a century. So the clocks I pay attention to are network aware, not like Skynet aware but like AT&T, too incompetent to be evil but smart enough to keep time. Clocks on the microwave and stove are turned off. No alarm clocks by the beds—iPhones—and no wall clocks, until now.

1. Since the beginning of time, man has been fascinated with the measurement of time and has devised more accurate machines to trap and measure time.
   

Thus reads the manual from my Atomic Clock, and it’s true. It also says Colorado is some kind of Mecca for Atomic Clocks.

1. Windows facing Colorado providing the best signal. Electrical storms between you and Colorado during the night will interfere with the WWVB signal.
   

WWVB is the radio station for Nuclear Powers like myself.

1. The WWVB time signal will easily penetrate Masonry and wood framed buildings. It is not possible, however, for WWVB to penetrate most indoor shopping malls and rooms in the center of large office buildings that do not have windows.
   

My atomic clock just kept running backwards a couple of hours hours at a time, which would have been great if time had run backwards, too, like my own personal Groundhog Day. You can damn sure bet I would have been thoroughly testing the Observer Effect when it came to lottery tickets, but it was just the clock spinning its hands. So, I decided to take the clock outside and try to set it.

My wife took this picture. Unfortunately, I could not get her to use the timer and come stand at my side. I don’t know if her blatant disregard for movie poster re-enactments or her balking at patriarchal social structure was to blame, but the clock still wouldn’t work.

I hung the clock on the wall anyway, so that I could hate it and talk about how much I hate, and that made my wife roll her eyes, which is also not in the patriarchal social structure handbook, but I didn’t care. I was busy hating just like Glenn Beck tells me to. I believed that since I was not a nuclear power, Obama Death Panels would be banging on my door at any moment.

Oh, me of little faith.

The next morning when I got up at 6:00 AM, it was 6:00 AM on the wall! My clock activated overnight and I became a nuclear power. Fear me.