Maybe you saw this in the news about a year ago. Dottie's post reminded me of it.

In Cambridge England is a clock that challenges all preconceptions about telling time. It has no hands or digital numbers, and it is designed to run in erratic fashion, slowing down and speeding up.

Rather than having it toll the hour by a bell or cuckoo, the clock relies on the clanking of a chain that falls into a coffin, which then bangs closed.

The clock is a tribute to John Harrison, the Englishman who in 1725 invented the grasshopper escapement, a mechanical device that helps regulate a clock's movement.

Making a visual pun on the grasshopper image, the clock has a demonic version of a grasshopper on top of the gold-plated clock face where it devours time. The beast, with its long needle teeth and barbed tail, rocks back and forth, inserting its talons in notches at the top of the clock to move it forward. Halfway through the minute the grasshopper's jaws begin to open, snapping shut at 59 seconds.

"Time is gone; he's eaten it," said John Taylor inventor. The over-size grasshopper (about 24 inches long) is called a "Chronophage" which translates to 'time eater.'

The clock, four feet in diameter, displays time using LEDs. The light races around the outer ring once every second; the next ring inside indicates the minute, the inner ring shows the hour.

The clock's pendulum slows down or speeds up. Sometimes it stops, the Chronophage shakes a foot, and the pendulum moves again. Because of that, the time display might be a minute off, but it swings back to correct time every five minutes.

The inventor said: "I'm in my early 70s and I realize that time is a destroyer. When you're a young person, you think there is plenty of time. The sound was to remind me of my mortality. There are so many expressions in every day life about time going fast, time going slow, and time standing still. Your life is not regular; it's relative to what's going on."

To give this whole thing some validity, Stephen Hawking himself introduced the clock at its unveiling.