{"id":9704,"date":"2020-09-19T07:11:58","date_gmt":"2020-09-19T14:11:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/?p=9704"},"modified":"2020-10-01T10:12:44","modified_gmt":"2020-10-01T17:12:44","slug":"a-good-citizen-the-blue-angels-watch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/2020\/09\/19\/a-good-citizen-the-blue-angels-watch\/","title":{"rendered":"A good Citizen: The Blue Angels watch"},"content":{"rendered":"

My first-edition Citizen Blue Angels<\/a>\"\" watch, the one you see above, is one of my favorites.\u00a0 There’s a lot going on in what the watch displays, including the time of day in three time zones (local, any other location in the world, and Greenwich Mean Time).\u00a0 The Citizen has a stop watch, a countdown timer, a calendar, and the ability to set up to three alarms.\u00a0 It also has a 24-hour clock. Those two LCD displays at the bottom of the watch face?\u00a0 I haven’t figured those out yet.\u00a0 I guess I could read the Owner’s Manual.\u00a0 Some day, maybe.\u00a0 And that complicated bezel?\u00a0 That’s a slide rule.\u00a0 I’ll explain it in a bit.<\/p>\n

I travel overseas frequently (or at least I used to, before this Covid 19 business hit), and knowing what time it is wherever I am and what time it is at home is a feature I like.\u00a0 The watch has a digital display for every time zone and the analog hands display the local time.\u00a0 Or, you can reverse the displays.\u00a0 Press two buttons simultaneously, and the displays switch (what was displayed digitally displays on the analog hands, and vice versa).\u00a0 It’s a cool feature and it’s fun watching the hour hand sweep around to a new time zone.<\/p>\n

One feature I use a lot is the stop watch.\u00a0 \u00a0It’s handy when I’m cooking, which I like to do.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Ravioli alfredo, with mushrooms, timed to perfection by the Blue Angels.\u00a0 Three minutes on the boil for the ravioli provides the al dente texture I prefer.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The slide rule is cool, too.\u00a0 It’s the complex blue bezel with all the numbers and graduations.\u00a0 Go back 50 years and every engineer on the planet had and used a slide rule (we had pocket protectors, too, but that’s a story for another blog).\u00a0 My engineering class was the last one that used slide rules.\u00a0 Calculators had just been invented, and in the early 1970s a basic Hewlett Packard or Texas Instruments calculator sold for something north of $600.\u00a0 That was a lot of money, and I remember thinking that calculators would never catch on.\u00a0 Who needs a $600 calculator when you have a slide rule?<\/p>\n

A few years ago we road tested the early CSC 150 Mustangs, and we hired a couple of my Cal Poly engineering students (guys who weighed 130 pounds soaking wet) to ride the things.\u00a0 We wanted to check fuel economy, and flyweight riders would register the best possible miles per gallon.\u00a0 At our first fuel stop we noted miles and fuel.\u00a0 I used my Citizen’s slide rule bezel and calculated the fuel economy while our young engineers were still fumbling with their cell phone calculators.\u00a0 One of them asked how I knew so quickly, and when I told them I used a slide rule, I had their attention.\u00a0 These two young engineers had never seen a slide rule, much less one built into a watch bezel.\u00a0 I showed them how the slide rule worked, and they had a lesson right there at the gas pump from their old engineering professor.<\/p>\n

\"\"
Steve (CSC’s CEO), Peter, and Joel by a historic bridge in the San Gabriel Mountain foothills. The verdict was in and my Citizen watch made it official: 98.3 miles per gallon.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"\"
Citizen Blue Angels<\/a>\"\" slide rules can be amazingly accurate.\u00a0 The outer bezel is the numerator, and the inner bezel is the denominator. We went 116 miles and used 1.18 gallons of fuel, so the calculation for mpg is 116 miles\/1.18 gallons, or 98.3 mpg (as represented by the two arrows on the right).\u00a0 You read the answer on the outer bezel over the 10 on the inner bezel (as represented by the two arrows on the left).\u00a0 It’s 98.3.\u00a0 Easy, isn’t it?<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Citizen Blue Angels<\/a>\"\" styling themes have been applied to several iterations and styles of their Blue Angels series since I bought my watch.\u00a0 There have been titanium versions, solar powered versions, leather strap versions, GMT versions, radio-synched-time versions, and more.\u00a0 I checked the Citizen official US website as I wrote this blog and they show nine different models in the Blue Angels watch collection.\u00a0 That’s not counting models that have been discontinued (like mine).<\/p>\n

Citizen Blue Angels<\/a>\"\"<\/p>\n

I don’t need or want one of the newer Blue Angels watches.\u00a0 Mine is the original version and I like it.\u00a0 Like most quartz-movement watches, it’s scary accurate.\u00a0 Yeah, it takes a battery, but a battery seems to last about three years and I can live with that (spending $3.25 every thousand days for a new battery is doable).\u00a0 I think I spent about $275 for my Blue Angels watch when I bought it 20 years ago.\u00a0 That was in the pre-Amazonic era (which came after the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods), when dinosaurs like me ruled the planet.\u00a0 New Blue Angels Citizen watches today range from the high $300s to just under a thousand bucks.\u00a0 They seem to last forever, so your money will be well spent.<\/p>\n

The funny part, I guess, is that the real Blue Angels, the guys (and gals) who fly F-18s for the US Navy and the US Marines, don’t wear Citizen Blue Angel watches, and I don’t know if they ever did.\u00a0 In researching this topic, I found that the Blue Angels’ official watch is an IWC (they go for a cool $10,900), but I don’t care.\u00a0 I like my Citizen.<\/p>\n

\"\"
The IWC Blue Angels watch. Got a spare $10,900?\u00a0 And just look at it: For that kind of money, you’re not even getting a slide rule.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I’m not sure what the relationship is between the Blue Angels and the Citizen company these days.\u00a0 I tried to find out with several search phrases on Google, but I came up empty.\u00a0 My guess is that the Navy allows Citizen to use the name for a fee, but that’s just a guess on my part.<\/p>\n

Citizen also offered a Thunderbirds version of my watch, something they no longer do (the Thunderbirds are the US Air Force flight demonstration team).\u00a0 The Thunderbirds watch is an even rarer animal.\u00a0 I don’t think the colors work as well as the Blue Angels watch (they look better on an F-16), but hey, different strokes for different folks.<\/p>\n

\"\"
A used Citizen Thunderbirds watch that sold in Singapore a couple of years ago for 50 Singaporean dollars (about $40 US). Nice, but not as nice as the Blue Angels version.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I used to have a bunch of cool Blue Angels photos I shot at the Reno Air Races (photos of the real Blue Angels flight team in action), but I guess I deleted them (I looked, but I could not find any).\u00a0 I had posted the photos way back when on the old MotoFoto site, and a law firm sent me a registered letter reminding me that my ticket to the Reno Air Races included a prohibition against displaying any photos from the event.\u00a0 It must have been a slow day for the lawyers.\u00a0 I imagine with Instagram and Facebook that would never fly today.\u00a0\u00a0If you ever had an opportunity to see a Blue Angels or Thunderbirds flight demonstration, you should go.\u00a0 I’ve seen both, and they are impressive.<\/p>\n

\n

More product reviews are here on the ExNotes Reviews page<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Click on the Citizen Blue Angels<\/a>\"\" link to see more Citizen Blue Angels<\/a>\"\".<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My first-edition Citizen Blue Angels watch, the one you see above, is one of my favorites.\u00a0 There’s a lot going on in what the watch displays, including the time of day in three time zones (local, any other location in the world, and Greenwich Mean Time).\u00a0 The Citizen has a stop watch, a countdown timer, … Continue reading “A good Citizen: The Blue Angels watch”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9719,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[96,64,507],"tags":[1350,1357,1356,1352,1355,1351],"class_list":["post-9704","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-feel-good-stuff","category-gear","category-watch","tag-blue-angels","tag-citizen-blue-angels","tag-citizen-navihawk","tag-iwc","tag-stop-watch","tag-thunderbirds"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/08\/DSC_9761-900-1.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9704","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9704"}],"version-history":[{"count":36,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9704\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10204,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9704\/revisions\/10204"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/9719"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9704"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9704"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/exhaustnotes.us\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9704"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}