I just got myself a new watch. As I was setting its time, I wondered what year I should set it for: 1974 or 2005. Aliens abducted me over the weekend and I wasn’t sure whether our hyper light speed flight had played some relativistic time travel trick.

I looked around for cues that would tell me which decade I had landed in. I saw a couple of really foxy chicks stroll by in hip hugger jeans. Well, no help there, I thought. They were speaking with some boys who had long hair and tie-dyed t-shirts, but since the aliens dropped me off in Eugene, Oregon, that didn’t help much either. Everything in Eugene looks like 1974.

I overheard the kids talking about our need to get off of foreign oil. They said that Detroit had put all its marketing and development into really big gas-guzzling luxury cars, and they were getting the pants beat off them by innovative small Japanese cars that got fantastic gas mileage. I was still without a good clue: is it 1974 or 2005?

Finally I saw hope. A young man in military dress greens approached. As we spoke he told me he had just spent a tour overseas in Asia and was headed back for another tour in country. He told me of the guerilla insurgency he was fighting and how difficult it was to fight an enemy you can’t see. He also complained how difficult it was to win the hearts and minds of the people when their own countrymen kept blowing them up and spreading chaos throughout the region. He had to go and still I couldn’t tell: was it 1974 or 2005?

I went to a coffee shop. As I stood in line, I overheard a two women talking about the president. It had to do with some sort of scandal where the president’s men were being investigated by a special prosecutor and now there was the discovery of this gap in time where important records may have disappeared. This was getting frustrating. Is it 1974 or 2005?

Then I overheard them referring to the gap in time being 12 hours long, not 18 1/2 minutes. And the barista charged me $4.50 for the coffee.

Eureka! It’s 2005!

(CBS Face The Nation) SCHIEFFER: Let me also shift to this whole Karl Rove controversy and the leak of the CIA agent who was his wife — her name. You were the White House counsel when all of this took place. And according to Frank Rich in The New York Times this morning, on September 29th, 2003, when you were the White House counsel, the Justice Department notified you that it had opened an investigation into who outed Joe Wilson’s wife, but that you waited 12 hours to notify White House staffers that they had to preserve materials connected to that case. That, of course, would give people time to shred documents and do any number of things. Why didn’t you immediately notify the White House staff that this Justice Department investigation was about to commence?

Mr. GONZALES: When I was the counsel, it was always my practice to work very, very closely and carefully with investigators and to seek permission with respect to every step that I took with respect to an investigation. In this particular case, we were notified by the Department of Justice late one evening. I guess it was about 8:00. And I specifically had our lawyers go back to the Department of Justice lawyers and ask them, ‘Do you want us to notify the staff now, immediately, or would it be OK to notify the staff early in the morning?’ And we were advised, ‘Go ahead and notify the staff early in the morning. That would be OK.’ And again, most of the staff had gone home. No one knew about the investigation. And we made…

SCHIEFFER: Well, let me just ask you the obvious question, Mr. Attorney General. Did you tell anybody at the White House, ‘Get ready for this, here it comes’?

Mr. GONZALES: I told one person in the White House that — of the notification and…

SCHIEFFER: Who?

Mr. GONZALES: …then immediately — I told the chief of staff. And then immediately the next morning, I told the president. And shortly thereafter, there was a notification sent out to all the members of the White House staff.

(Get ready for the Righties’ response of “Well, Justice said that Gonzalez could wait until morning to tell ‘staff’, and that the ‘chief of staff’ is not ‘staff’.)