Wednesday, January 07, 2009

The Curious Case of John Ruggiero


Good Evening, I'm your host Rod Serling.

Submitted for your approval:

Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. Case in point: A Mr. John Ruggiero, a middle aged railroad conductor from Connecticut, takes his wife on a Sunday afternoon date to the movies. They have purchased two tickets to see the latest Brad Pitt blockbuster, "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"...little do they know...they have two aisle seats in... "The Twilight Zone."

First some background:

"The Curious Case of Bejamin Button" is based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, in which a man ( Benjamin) ages in reverse. He is born old, but for some reason his internal clock runs backward, so the more he ages... the younger he gets.
At times, the movie detours from the main narrative and tells a parallel story of a blind clockmaker, who has lost his son in World War I. The clockmaker's great masterpiece is the newly unveiled clock tower at The New Orlean's Train Station. The clock in the tower runs backward and serves as a memorial to the war dead, whose lives have ended much too soon.


Okay, this is when the story gets weird:

Conductor John really enjoyed the movie and when the lights came up in the theater, he checked his watch to see how long the movie had been. This is what he saw (this video is of John's actual watch):





If you missed it, the second hand is running counter clockwise.

John was understandably freaked out at what he saw. He's had this watch for 10 years and it has never given him a lick of trouble. He plans on bringing it to a watch repair shop for answers.

Serling:

"Einstein said that time is relative and it could never be totally understood. The same can be said for John Ruggiero and the time he spent in ...The Twilight Zone."

8 comments:

Leadhyena Inrandomtan said...

This happened to one of my watches as well. It's actually perfectly usable like that if you know how to read it that way. What happens is that you have a series of three gears and the middle of those gears slips out. The resulting final gear will spin in the opposite direction as its driver (because two touching gears will spin in opposite directions).

The timing could not have been better though. :D

Neva said...

That would freak me out too!

Anonymous said...

Awwww...you spoiled it for me Leadhyena!!! I was so hoping there would be more comments by other people having the same thing happen to their watches after seeing the movie. THAT would be so Twilight Zonish!
Ha-Ha
...if Conductor John starts getting younger...dee doo dee doo.
Keep us posted, Bobby!

Michael Malone said...

that is freaky.

something similar happened to me after i watched Pulp Fiction...my watch jumped ahead a day, then back a day, then ahead two days and back half a day. i had no idea what time/day it was.

Anonymous said...

excuse me there mr. bobby, but you, me and john are all about the same age. i am far from middle aged.

Unknown said...

I'm a junkie for stories like this, however freaky they are :) The stuff of the best books and movies out there...

Anonymous said...

Actually you're all wrong. If you took home the movie reel from the theater and ran it on your own, you would see that Brad Pitt ages normally (and speaks backward). They filmed it like this so it could be played in special movie theaters with magnets and something called a flux capacitor. This makes the movie seem like Brad Pitt is aging in reverse. As a consequence, watches run backward as well, but only if you were sitting close to the screen. This is true. I'm a scientist.

Andrew said...

Wow that was very freaky. I have never seen a watch like it. Maybe conductor John is getting younger.