daylight-saving time

I just noticed that my posts e'd by FeedBlitz do not include the streaming audio. I’ll be sure to mention audio coming or going in the words of the post. I’ll also watch for video insertion when that comes up and see how FeedBlitz handles it. The audio issue is probably because it is calling up flash instead of just an HTML link. I wonder how Reginold would have distributed - that was flash, too. Anyway.

Daylight-Saving Time. Get my hoe ready? What she got to do with any of this?

I never thought through the complexities of Daylight-Saving Time. Seems to me to be a national policy, must be a reason – just like there must be a reason for Boston to be such a governmental dick to kids with lemonade stands: get permission from five different government agencies, pay $335 in fees and licenses, comply with dozens of complex food and building ordinances, and carry $500,000 in liability insurance. I find such policy areas to be easy to leave to others to decide. They want my clock to change, I’m fine with it. They want to require prostate exams for all left-handed men at or over the age of 48 with grey hair living in the northeastern United States that work at home and have blogs, then they got a fight on their hands. But DST? Easy stuff.

After reading a lot of the history of DST, the energy savings, and all that, I decided to gather some writings on the opposition to it. Let’s see what gets people’s panties all bunched up over moving the clock hands back and forth twice a year.

Let’s get some business out of the way first: It is Daylight-Saving Time. The term uses the present participle saving as an adjective, as in labor-saving device. The hyphen is needed because: “6.15. Print a hyphen between words, or abbreviations and words, combined to form a unit modifier immediately preceding the word modified, … This applies particularly to combinations in which one element is a present or past participle.”

OK? Grammar Retards all aboard? Cool. Let’s go to the tape …

The Stupid tell us the extra hour of sunlight (hunh?) means more global warming: Letter to the Editor, Arkansas Democrat Gazette, Thursday April 18, 2007, Connie M. Meskimen: “ … As you know, Daylight Saving Time started almost a month early this year. You would think that members of Congress would have considered the warming effect that an extra hour of daylight would have on our climate. … Perhaps this is another plot by a liberal Congress to make us believe that global warming is a real threat. Perhaps next time there should be serious studies performed before Congress passes laws with such far-reaching effects.” Extra hour? You mean, Congress can change the whole Earth-Sun rotation thingey and, I mean, I’m getting brain freeze trying to figure this out, how it works. Do they slow down the rotation? I mean, like, you don’t create more Sun, do you? If we get more, doesn’t someone get less? Ah, the Chinese! No shit! Brilliant. But don’t they know? Wait, there’s something bigger here. I’m being set up for something. A Global-Warming Tax. Yeah, that’s it. The GWT. And here I thought that changing the hands on the clock was just the good-citizen thing to do. Man. Am I a fool. I bought right into in. Like a sheep to the stall at 2:00AM when Jim Bob holds the grain scoop: I should have known there was a fucking coming. Wow, those guys are smart! Wow. I had no idea. This Connie should get a prize of some sorts.

The Geeks tell us “VCRs, computers, some cellphones, and other devices will need to be updated to reflect the change, trashed, or have their shortcomings suffered gladly for a month out of the year.”. You mean, you guys didn’t anticipate something as simple as a shifting DST? I gotta throw it out? You people suck at programming.

Some Jews appear to have a conspiracy theory. Ultra-Orthodox Sephardic Jews have campaigned against Daylight Saving Time because they recite Slikhot penitential prayers in the early morning hours during the Jewish month of Elul. A writer in 1947 noted, “I don't really care how time is reckoned so long as there is some agreement about it, but I object to being told that I am saving daylight when my reason tells me that I am doing nothing of the kind. I even object to the implication that I am wasting something valuable if I stay in bed after the sun has risen. As an admirer of moonlight I resent the bossy insistence of those who want to reduce my time for enjoying it. At the back of the Daylight Saving scheme I detect the bony, blue-fingered hand of Puritanism, eager to push people into bed earlier, and get them up earlier, to make them healthy, wealthy and wise in spite of themselves.” (Robertson Davies, The Diary of Samuel Marchbanks, 1947, XIX, Sunday.)

The Others tells us something that I can’t quite figure out, but it sounds really bad: “Food for thought – Neptune, the planet symbolic of confusion and chaos, finally, after retrograding between the last degree of Cancer and the first degree of Leo, entered Leo, ruled by the sun, permanently on the first day of May, 1916, just a few hours after Germany put Daylight Saving Time into effect at 11 p.m. on the 30th of April, the night before!”

Connie teaches us that the Sun is up more, and Sammy tells us that the Moon is out less. The geek dude tells us to trash the devices we would use to record government-broadcasted messages on the television – so no record of their coded instructions to us. And now this Neptune getting cured of cancer thing comes in (and the government keeping the cure to themselves, so that they will be healthy, but not us). See how it all falls into place?

And you people wonder why I blog in the corner of a dark closet with hat boxes between me and the door and clothes draped over my head. Go figure. You people want to follow the scoop of grain, go for it. I'm gonna use a sundial from here forward.