This issue's fun 'n' fascinating project was asking Bates people around the world to provide photographs of themselves taken at the same minute on Nov. 3, 2005. The chosen time — 9:47 a.m. Eastern, 2:47 Greenwich Mean Time — was picked partly at random and partly so we might reasonably expect contributors to be awake, even in Asia, where it would be 11:47 at night.

It turned out to be a blast because nearly everyone we contacted responded with such typical Bates friendliness, interest, and, best of all from our selfish standpoint, ability to get the job done.

In Washington, the office of Rep. Bob Goodlatte '75 made sure that photographer Joe Gromelski '74, himself taking time from his editing job at Stars & Stripes, could get through Capitol security. At the NAACP Legal Defense Fund annual meeting in Manhattan, board secretary James Nabritt III '52 communicated with efficiency on behalf of himself and fellow board member Karen Hastie Williams '66: "If the photographer will come to the area at 9:47 and find Norma Lewis, the board assistant secretary, at the desk outside the meeting room, she or her designee will come and get us for a brief period of posing."

At the 6,800-acre Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, 45 miles west of Chicago, Tom Diehl '82 left a meeting early to join fellow physicist (and spouse) Brenna Flaughter '83 with a scale model of their 500 million pixel Dark Energy camera. When completed, the camera will be mounted on a telescope in the Andes to examine so-called dark energy and dark matter.

Following the sun farther west, at the Fess Parker Winery and Vineyard in California, Ashley Parker Snider '86 joked that it might be a tad early to pop a bottle of her vineyard's highly regarded pinot noir "even by my standards! Buttering toast for my three kids is more like it." Still, she did head out the door on Nov. 3 at 6:47 a.m. for a meeting in Los Angeles with her distributor.

In the dean's office of Boston University's School of Public Health, Peter Reich '65 put us in e-mail contact with Ona Erike, daughter of Dr. Dennis Okeke '51, a BU medical school alum who is medical director and founder of the Eaastern Nigeria Medical Centre. Erike in turn contacted friend Piokje James Lucas, who took the photo of Dr. Okeke right at 3:47 p.m. local Nigerian time.

And at day's end in Tokyo, Kimmochi Eguchi '97 took a self-portrait as he relaxed at home with a drink of sake, a clock positioned in the background reading 11:47. He responded to followup e-mails asking about the sake brand, Hana Ginga. "'Hana' means elegance," said Eguchi. "'Ginga' is a mixture of two words, 'galaxy' and "taste.' Shuffling the words, it becomes 'elegance of taste like galaxy.' That's the idea anyway!"

In the end, 20 alums, two professors, two staff members, and six senior friends in Moody House contributed photos. Twelve are in print here and all can be seen on a slide show. The varied group was brought together in something of an artificial construct, but it's not hard at all to view the images and let your mind create a pleasing sense of concord.

To everyone involved, a big thanks from Bates Magazine.