If they're going to keep milking that Moon cow for what she's worth, they could've done worse...the Saturn V subdial motif is seriously slick, among other details. But, yeah, 44mm is a tad OTT for me.

That idea came about a decade-and-change ago, when my collection was almost solidly Hammy until my pair of vintage Khaki mechanicals broke down almost simultaneously, without anything approaching serious abuse: I think I'm going to write a piece on that little sea-change itself. I'd meant to sell these three off some time ago, but given the apparent increase in value, my laziness might've paid off!

Much as I despise the song this line comes from*, my evolved strategy, such as it is, has been "know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em." This has come about simply as a result of playing with all sorts of watches an almost unseemly amount for a sane adult, and keeping track of what did it for me and what didn't. Which itself isn't easy, since personal taste is often a bit of a moving target.

At the same time, I've been watching my fave YouTube watch folk attempt the horological equivalent of Dry January by paring down their collections: TGV appears to be whittling his wristworn brood to a literal handful; Russ, The Mad Watch Collector, claims to want to bring it down to an even ten...not counting the Casios, because Of Course. Others have mused over what would constitute the perfect "one and done" watch.

Lucky me: my collection never went beyond fifteen, including at least one never-to-run-again Seiko LordMatic. Right now, I'm set to bring the bunch down to The Nine: six Seikos and three Casios. (On my planet, the Casios count.) Leaving the group are a trio of vintage Hamiltons, including a just-sold chronograph which I apparently let go for a bit too cheap, given that someone pulled the Buy It Now trigger less than twenty minutes after I put the thing up for auction.

Buying? Other than (possibly) Seiko's limited-edition 5 Sports 1968 reissue - if there are any left by the time I'm ready - there's nothing on my acquisition radar right now: my big thing is to send off my otherwise-wonderful Seiko 6139 "blue eye" chronograph for a proper re-luming of the dial, hands, and pip on the internal rotating bezel, and maybe have my Seiko 5 Sports Spacewalk Anniversary (that would be Seiko's other Anniversary for the 5, which was in 2013) sent off to the Mothership for a full service.

So there you go: nine watches, maybe ten. We'll see how long that holds.

(* I prefer really early Kenny Rogers, when he was with The First Edition.)

Because, among other cool stuff, you can take off on that impulsive weekend trip with your buds and never curse out loud that you forgot to bring along your charger-dongle-thingie. Few things worse than having an expensive black hole on your wrist to stare into for a day or three.

Boom. Well-played.

I've always stuck to the "go with what you truly like" mantra. That said, TAG has done a good job the past few years pulling itself back from the brink of irrelevance. And yours is a great example of this.

Horses-for-courses, I feel: depends on the application: for a dive watch I'd actually be relying on for its intended purpose, a unidirectional ratcheted dial is clearly the way to go, although early dive watches seemed to manage well with well-made friction mechanisms.

OTOH, I'm very happy with the friction bezel on my Seiko 5 Sports GMT, because (1) the friction-fit is quite tenacious, damned near impossible to budge by accident, (2) bidirectional action makes it faster to adjust when I need to, and (3), it's an effing GMT - it doesn't need to be adjusted all that often (generally the case with "caller" GMTs...I'm not that itinerant a traveler, so there's no need to be futzing with the thing when taking off for wherever). 😀