Timing is Everything

Over the past few years, I’ve tried to master the skill of flipping through the newspaper without actually reading it. That way, I sort of absorb the basic headlines and news but I don’t have to pop tranquilizers to counteract the effects of seeing the woefully inaccurate grammar and vocabulary usage that makes it to the pages. Obviously, it doesn’t work all the time. There have been times when I’ve read Tuesday’s newspaper on Wednesday and Thursday, and felt only the softest prickle of awareness that there may be something wrong. This morning, however, it was more like being in a sci-fi flick.

I got up, grabbed some water in a vain effort to balance out the half a bottle of Glenfiddich I polished off last night, picked up the newspaper and started flicking through it. I decided to gently reintroduce myself to the world with the Bombay Times, because I thought it may be a good idea to be able to open one’s eyes more than a millimetre while attempting to read real news. Somewhere in the middle of the supplement, I saw this ad:

The BAFTAs! Yay, I thought. Primarily because I’d read a bunch of “prediction” pieces last night saying Colin Firth was going to sweep everything. As the malt-slackened wheels of my mind painfully turned, I felt certain that one of the things I’d read was a live blog of the BAFTAs.

Except the advertisement in the Bombay Times was telling me that the BAFTAs would come on “LIVE at 2.30am today”.

But what is technically 2.30am today is actually yesterday. Not only because at 2.30 am, I was just about finishing up my Get Plastered Project but because newspapers don’t reach a reader before 6.30am, at the earliest. Surely it doesn’t make sense to tell readers to see something “LIVE” four hours later, when the event is over.

Which would mean 2.30am today is technically tomorrow.

Except tonight/tomorrow at 2.30am can’t have a live telecast of the BAFTAs since the awards ceremony was last night.

Which means I can’t watch it live and celebrate the best of Hollywood, as the advertisement suggests I do because the implied present tense in “today” is actually referring to the past.

Bummer.