But none, none tell precisely the hour, the place, or the cause of Mandelstam's death.
He'd dragged me out to his favorite mall, Kowloon's Ocean Center, to buy the newest Lego Bionicle, in what by coincidence was precisely the hour when Hong Kong was dropped from the World Health Organization's epidemic list, and SARS was officially vanquished.
And this morning, at precisely 11, the hour when Samuel de Champlain and company were thought to have landed at Quebec, bells will peal across Canada, from Newfoundland to Vancouver.
Until the troubles took their recent turn for the worse, it went like this every late summer: The city threatened draconian layoffs and program cuts in its schools, and the state ran in at the last moment to save the day -- or, more precisely, delay the hour of reckoning.
A shotgun blast precisely on the hour will send us westward along the Western States Trail--19,000 feet up, 21,000 feet down, 100 miles distance.
And a few minutes later, at precisely the appointed hour -- 7 30 a.m.
EVERY few days, at precisely the same hour, a quiet group of experts files into a special room in Bergen op Zoom in the Netherlands.
I sat sullenly and stared, checking my watch in the evening so I could order them to bed at precisely the appointed hour.
Last fall, at precisely the same hour my 81-year-old mother was being handed a lung cancer diagnosis at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, my 84-year-old father was calling 911 for a pesky nosebleed.
Theaters will begin showing the movie at precisely the same hour worldwide, beginning in Los Angeles at 6 a.m., in New York at 9 a.m., in Moscow at 5 p.m. and at 11 p.m. in Tokyo.
The Chinese, who have assiduously courted Pacific Island nations in recent years, are also attending, and when Clinton arrived Friday night (Rarotonga time), it did not escape reporters' attention that the Chinese delegation had scheduled a press conference for precisely the same hour.
