Adventures with the good doctor

in the vanguard of a Trump flotilla

The NIST-F2 is a cesium-fountain atomic clock located in Boulder, Colorado. It is the nation’s primary time and frequency standard, used among other things for military-grade sat nav systems. It fires atoms through a microwave chamber, and then witchcraft and wizardry are used to ensure it maintains extreme accuracy. So accurate is it that, in the next 300 million years, it will neither gain nor lose a single second.

Compared to the good doctor though, it’s unreliable.

So when he called last summer and suggested he would pick up the Queen Mother and me at 11am for a trip out to Seguin Island off the coast of Maine and a picnic under the lighthouse, we planned our morning accordingly. I checked of course that Saint Mary was coming with him. She’s Irish, but merely acknowledging her Irishness doesn’t do her justice for she’s a beautiful “colleen” as they say over there, with jet black hair and flashing green eyes, a lilt in her voice and a ready laugh. She could set the room on fire, that one. Quite what she sees in the good doctor is beyond me.

Sure enough, precisely at 10:59am, they came roaring into Sagadahoc Bay. Now look, the guy’s a successful doctor, I was expecting a boat that had a touch of class about it, you know, perhaps a little mahogany or…