Watch Me

We start with this ad full of red cloaked demons and a couple of insidiously cute girls:


Pit Stop - Breitling TV commercial
which leads to this video of a guy taking apart a very fancy watch and repairing it


Service and repair of a rusty valjoux 7750 based Breitling watch
Which gets me to wondering about the market for used and / or broken Breitling watches, which takes me to Ebay where I find there are thousands of Breitlings are available (5,954 at the moment). Looking for broken ones turns up 27 listings, and most of those are just for spare parts. Well, how about watches in general? How about a million and a half? The first one on that list:


How can you sell a watch for $2.86? I suppose if they fell off the back of a truck you could do that. I just don't understand. This gets me wondering about watch factories, which leads to Wikipedia's list of Watch movement manufacturers which contains only 15 names. But look! One of them is Russian (two actually). How bizarre.


Never heard of a Russian watch. But if you think about it, it kind of makes sense. They cut themselves off from the rest of world, and they had this attitude that anything the capitalist running dogs can do, we can do better, so of course they are going to make their own watches. Ebay has 13,000 odd listings. Many are mechanical (i.e. not quartz), many are old, some are Russian in name only.

Then we find this:

Raketa has made a giant clock for a children's toy store in the Lubyanka

What?!? The KGB's Moscow prison is now a toy store? Tell me it ain't so, Boris. Actually it's in a department store on Lubyanka square in Moscow, which just so happens to be where the infamous Lubyanka is located.

Update January 2019 replaced missing video.