Things That Got Circumcised From My Watches & Wonders Article

Plus Eating in Geneva!

As you know, publications will often trim my overwritten articles for clarity and space and stuff. That’s cool. But I like to show my substackers what’s been left on the cutting room floor. Recently, I went to the grandest watch shows of all, Watches & Wonders in Geneva. Here’s a gift link in case you haven’t seen it (and are not allergic to watches): https://shorturl.at/NwyvB

In any case, I write the piece for Bloomberg and Bloomberg has what’s called a “Standards” department and so some stuff had to go. Primarily, they cut all the stuff I done written about the fact that the Watches & Wonders fair put me and a bunch of American journalists square into Geneva’s red light district! Here is some of the risque stuff they cut. For example, the stuff in bold was deemed too incendiary:

“On March 31^st of this year, I flew to Geneva. “On the left side, you can catch the view of Montblanc,” the pilot announced. It looked like a nice snowcapped mountain, but it wasn’t wearing a watch, so I gave it a pass and looked instead at the excellent gilt-dialed Rolex GMT from the 1960s on my wrist. The organizers of Watches and Wonders had put me in a room that seemed airlifted out of a German Democratic Republic dormitory cattycorner to a very popular brothel (to be fair, I had registered late…but still). I doffed my imaginary cap to all the working ladies who had gathered down the Rue de Berne to pay their respects to me with cries of “Ça va?” and ran straight for the famed lakeside Hotel des Bergues. (Geneva, you may be interested to learn, is set around a pointlessly large lake of greenish blue with a frothy fountain at one end.)”

See what they did? Also, the following was cut:

“A few glasses of Campari later, I found myself transported back to my home in the Red Light district. From a darkened doorway near my hotel, a local woman demonstrated her fondue-making capacities using both hand and mouth. “Ça va?” she all but screamed at me. Back in my East German-style hotel room, I tried to sleep but some madman sang and loudly wept through the night right outside my window. “It’s not you,” I wanted to shout down to him. “It’s Watches and Wonders.”"

You get the idea. I was trying to add a little local color and maybe make a connection with the stuff going on at the actual Watches & Wonders fair, and the action on the street.

Speaking of circumcising content, the following line, my review of a new Patek Calatrava watch, got cut for the very act of cutting!:

“I will register my only complaint: the watch would have been even more glorious if one or two millimeters had been circumcised from its diameter, but I don’t want to be snippy in the presence of glory.”

Oh, well. In any case, I love being edited, but a part of me wants all my crap to survive in one form or another.

Now, people have noticed that I didn’t post a lotta food pics from Geneva. Well, it ain’t really my favorite food town despite having all kindsa cuisine on account of the UN and all.