Gadgets

The New York Times sent a photographer inside Grand Central Station’s biggest clock—the one on the facade, not the indoor one on the pedestal. He emerged with an amazing spherical panorama that could’ve easily been taken in 1928.

This strange little nook, hidden behind a clockface, pictured below, that thousands of people see every day, doesn’t even exist as far as most people are concerned, except for the few intrepid graffiti artists who’ve made it up here—”SODA TIME” is an easy favourite defacement, but click through to the panorama to find your own—and the guy who comes up here to keep this thing greased and running, with appropriately quaint, old-timey oil cans.

His name is Vernon—an overly distinguished, he thought; one he always hated, and which the kids at the foster home made sure to hold against him. He was stricken with a rare fungal growth at the age of 14, which transformed his right eye—the good one, the one he could use to seek refuge in comic books—into a grizzled keloid. He was given, or bequeathed, really, a job by the friendless old man who’d been oiling the gears since the early 1900s, and who took a shine to the boy, for, however offensive his visage, he had a fine heart.

Until it was broken, by a girl from Hoboken. Her name is Tiffany, and she just couldn’t find it in her being to love him, no matter how many times Vernon made it clear, with kindness, affection, and even once, heroism, that she was his beginning and his end, his night and his day, his pain and his relief, his life and his death. Now, as Vernon sits idly in this faintly luminescent cell, oiling gears and scratching words into the walls. Tiffany is now on trial for murder, but trust Verne—and trust me—she didn’t do it. [Victor Hugo via the NYT via Fark]