Last Call
Today I learned why Daylight Saving Time starts at 2am.
To avoid confusion in the inner drinking clocks of regular barflies, the change doesn't take place until after last call. If it were to happen earlier than that, you'd have a bunch of pissed off drunks every spring who were cheated out of an hour of booze. Plus, every autumn you get an bonus hour, and who'd complain about that?
I also learned a few trivial things about DST.
- In Europe they call it "Summer Time" and it starts at 1am the last Sunday in March, and ends the last Sunday in October.
- The whole idea of Daylight Saving Time was Ben Franklin's. He was a night-owl and a cheapskate who wanted to use more natural light to save money by burning less candles and using less oil in his lamps.
- The US supposedly saves something like 300,000 barrels of oil a year by using less artificial lighting and because people spend more time outdoors. Supposedly.
- This fall, DST is a few days later which is going to suck on Halloween. The idea was to make Halloween safer for kids (kid deaths are 4 times higher on October 31st), but really, who's going to go Trick-or-Treating in broad daylight? All that's going to happen is the kids are going to be out later and more bratty the next day. I KNOW I'm right about this.
- In the fall, when the clocks go back an hour, Amtrak trains stop running at 2am for a full hour so their schedules don't get messed up. In the spring, they just keep going, hoping to catch up. Why don't they just change the schedules for those days?
- There are less traffic accidents during Daylight Saving.
- There is no "s" in Daylight Saving. It is NOT Savings.
9 comments:
Hey, you could just live in this shitty little town and never know when your kids get to go trick-or-treating. Because hells bells if Halloween fall on a Tuesday, can't have kids trick-or-treating any day of the week. This year since Halloween falls on a Wednesday, this fucked up town will have trick-or-treating on Saturday, October 27th. And lets not for get the mandated times for trick-or-treat. 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. Enough bitching about B.F.E.
wonders where i'll be living at halloween... hopefully i'll be out of this state again and owning a place in the country again... ..also wonders if the computers are going to recognize the new time changes automatically...
I think we should wake up at the first ray of light and go to sleep when it gets dark. Shouldn't we?
That's what's happening with me Max. My freaking bachelor neighbors love to party on their patio which is next to my bedroom.. it's now 5:21 am (with the new time change) and they are still outside being noisy... GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR
It's kind of bizarre that we're still following the advice of Benjamin Franklin, the same man who suggested it should be the goal of science "to discover some drug... that shall render the natural discharges of wind from our bodies not only inoffensive, but agreeable as perfumes," and who once told a male friend, without irony, that it was more palatable to have sex with a woman over 40 by first "covering her head with a basket."
Spitzy.. Is that what they mean when they refer to the 'basket' trick?
Have they re-scheduled Christmas for Friday yet?
No Madmax, I think we should sleep til 10 and stay up as long as possible.
Bizarre Mr. Spitz? I call it freakin genius. On both counts. Oops. I'm almost 40. What am I saying?
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