This Sunday, March 14, marks the beginning of a time honored tradition – Daylight Saving Time. This is great for getting things done after work during the week, but not so good for waking up in time to get to work. High school students everywhere are going to have a terrible time of it. My daughter has one of those "zero periods" at her school, and she can hardly get there on time as it is.
Why do we do it? DST is often attributed to American Founding Father Ben Franklin, who satirically proposed that citizens of 18th century Paris, France begin their working days earlier. (One might presume that Parisians were late sleepers. Why not? They take 14 months off each year for vacation.) He thought the sounds of church bells and cannon fire should be the city's alarm clock. (That actually could help my daughter.) He also proposed taxing candles and shutters as a way of assisting the people to adjust to their new schedule. I don't know if he had a serious proposal for DST as much as he wanted to mess with France.
But it was Germany and its allies that started DST in 1916 to conserve coal during wartime. Britain and most of its allies soon succumbed to this dark madness, with Russia falling a year later. The United States didn't adopt DST until 1918, finally following the Europeans into a mental warp that I'm sure Einstein didn't understand.
So here we are, getting ready to flip our lives sideways, so that (the nation of?) shop keepers can induce customers to keep shopping for just a little bit longer. And why not? It's still a nice day, and there's plenty of time to find that special something before going home to prepare dinner. We'll all be spreading sun tan lotion on ourselves to mow the lawn after coming home from work. We can catch the sunset after we put the kids to bed.
This coming Sunday, we're going to add one whole hour to the end of our day. Let's be sure to use it wisely. Finish your taxes yet? You have one more hour. Forget something at the grocery store? No need to wait until the weekend. You have one more hour. Homework late? Here's an extra hour. Mail didn't come? Wait another hour. Hope and change? Give it about an hour.
Now, I thought this was crazy enough. But it turns out, it is not! For example, starting in 2007, we in the U.S. set our clocks ahead one hour on the second Sunday in March for DST. Then, on the first Sunday in November, clocks are set back one hour for local standard time. Arizona does not participate. Neither does Hawaii.
In 1966, we began DST on the last Sunday in April, and went back to Standard Time on the last Sunday in October. In 1974, DST began on January 6, and in 1975 it began on February23. Congress was going to save energy. It didn't, so we went back to jumping ahead on the last Sunday in April again. That lasted until 1987, when it changed to starting on the first Sunday in April. All this time, we didn't change when we set the clocks back an hour. That kept occurring on the last Sunday in October until, as I said, 2007, back to first Sunday in November.
I said this madness all started for the U.S. in 1918. It wasn't very popular back then, either. Daylight saving time was repealed in 1919, and became a local matter. Some people like getting up before the sun. Some people like partying with the midnight sun. But in World War 2, DST was continuously observed from February 9, 1942 to September 30, 1945. After that, it was a free for all.
I wonder how the Chile EQ Induced change in Earth's rotation will be dealt with this extra hour? It seems as though the Earth's rotation has increased by a teeny tiny amount. Will we eventually set the clocks ahead or back by an additional 3/millionths of a second? But oh HO! We already do that! (Sort of.)
Leap Seconds are seconds that are either added to or subtracted from the calendar year. It turns out that the rotation of the Earth isn't as stable as one might think. Tidal forces slow the Earth's rotation, making a day slightly longer than 24 hours. After a while, this could create havoc , since we really keep time according to a system of highly precise atomic clocks, including that maintained by the U.S. Naval Observatory. So, every few years, we add a second to a special day (either on June 30 or December 31).
I want to know why we don't just use DST to account for this. Why jump ahead and back by one hour? Why not one hour and 1.00003 seconds? It seems a little inefficient to make two regularly scheduled changes each year, and then slide a change in under the radar on a completely different day.
And just to show that I'm flexible, why not change by 67 minutes? According to Wiki, Saskatoon, Saskatchewan is 67 minutes ahead of mean solar time year round. I'm pretty sure that means they don't adjust the clocks for DST at all. They must stay half the year in the Central Time Zone, and half the year in the Mountain Time Zone. I bet nobody looses sleep over that.
So why not adjust the clocks to Saskatoon time and stay there? It's a point of reference we can all point to on a globe of the earth.
Also according to Wikipedia, about 2/3 of the world has either stopped using, or never used DST. Lucky bastards!
I say, as long as we're going to celebrate insanity, let's go one step further. Let's go all the way with this concept. Instead of just jumping ahead 1 hour, or 1.11669 hours (do the math), let's throw a whole extra Sunday into the weekend! For most Americans, this will mean more family time, more play time, and more time to come up with crazy life infiltrating schemes to confuse the hell out of everyone.
Then, to make up for our excess in life, six months later, we'll skip ahead one day. Like, let's skip Monday. Who's going to complain about that? This would mean that one week each year, we have a four day work week starting on a Tuesday. We even start the week with no Monday morning blas. It would be a problem for Monday Night Football ™, but I think their viewership is down anyway. Maybe one less Monday night game during the season would be a break for some people. (Especially Raider fans!)
Here's the last thing I want to say about DST. Suppose time is money, and every 6 months you either give up an extra dollar, or you get an extra dollar in change that nobody will take back. Everybody would take the change and be happy. Nobody will like giving up a dollar for no good reason. So the only sane thing to do is keep setting the clock forward every 6 months. Period. In 5 or 6 years we'll be getting up in the middle of the night and sleeping all day. My daughter will love that.
Oh. One more thing, and I always do this when I blog. People in Santa Clarita, California, and surrounding areas, need to be able to call on friendly, professional painters, who clean up after themselves, work in whatever time zone that is necessary (paint at night to keep business operating during the day), who can provide color selection service, and who can make their homes look like they've always wanted it. I'm talking, of course, about Executive Painting and Texture, Santa Clarita's premiere painting company. We know where you live, and we're going to make it even better.
http://www.executivepainting.net/
Executivepainting@gmail.com
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