| Discussion--"Everyone, synchronize your watches." This is a familiar phrase in espionage movies. It means that everyone should set their watches to exactly the same time. This helps the spies to coordinate their stealthy missions. I wonder if real-life spies ever dramatically say, "Synchronize your watches," or if they are more like, "Hey Bill, what time you got?" And then the other spy gets annoyed and says, "Dang it, Bob, I told you not use my real name on missions." To which the first spy retorts, "Well, Bill, you just used my real name." And then they begin using their spy names, Cobra and Lucifer, which is good because they end up getting caught because they forgot to synchronize their watches amidst all of the arguing about the watches. Well, I guess real spies probably aren't like this, but wouldn't it be funny if they were?
We see many examples of synchronization in sports and the performing arts. In synchronized swimming, the whole idea of the sport is for the various swimmers to move in precisely the same way at precisely the same time. Although this is not one of my favorite sports, I must admit that their timing is amazing, and it really does look quite neat when such a synchronization is pulled off correctly. Dancers often put together routines that require them to synchronize with each other. In football, certain plays are called timing patterns. In these plays the quarterback must be in sync with the receiver or the play will never work. The receiver will run a pattern that requires him to break at precisely the right time. The quarterback actually throws the ball before the receiver breaks! If the receiver breaks too early or too late, the ball will fall to the ground, and there will be one upset quarterback.
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