Fact or Fiction? 10,000 year clock being built in West Texas

That would be fact, in fact, and it’s none other than Amazon.com founder and gazillionaire Jeff Bezos who’s backing the project. 

The clock, as designed, will tick once a year, have a century hand that moves once every 100 years, and a cuckoo that, well, cuckoos once every 1,000 years. And the whole shootin’ match is being assembled in a ginormous tunnel in the Sierra Diablo mountains, on land that Bezos owns and for which there isn’t really any other good purpose so…why not?

This is dramatic scenery, by the way, laying just south of Guadalupe Peak, and about as rugged a stretch of landscape as you wouldn’t want to traverse without a healthy supply of water and some good snake-guards.

I guess I somehow missed the fact that Bezos spent some of his formative years in Houston, and his family has ranched in South Texas for many years.

Also interesting to note is that the general contractor for this project is listed on the website as Swaggart Brothers, Inc., headquartered in Oregon, which is presumably how Bezos found them. But their website doesn’t list this as one of the projects they’re involved in. You don’t suppose they’re a little bit embarrassed by this job, do you? It’s not exactly the sort of thing you brag about to your fellow hardhats in the local bar, unless it’s to crow about the huge amounts of dough you’re no doubt extracting from a certain eccentric billionaire.

I guess this project makes about as much sense as the Blue Origin spaceport Bezos is building in Culberson County.

Tip of the hat to Neatorama