I posted something about the following on my MySpace blog last year ... but here we are again, and I'm still not liking Eastern Standard Time - the loss of one hour of daylight, at the end of the day - one bit... So I'll make the complaint here again...
Many of my posts here are cheerful ... I especially like being cheerful about television because it irritates so many people... But with my clocks soon to fall back an hour, as per Eastern Standard time, I gotta say that I really can't stand Standard time.
It's not that I don't like standards (well, actually, I'm no big fan of them either, if you'd like to know). But what aggravates me no end is how early it gets dark when we shift to Standard time.
Some people - including my wife - think the too-early fall of night is well worth the extra hour of sleep in the morning. I never get enough sleep anyway. An hour more doesn't make much difference to me, if I'm up until 3 or 4 in the morning (as you can see by the time stamp on many of my posts).
But what I do care about is driving home in the evening - no, not even evening, more like late afternoon - and it's pitch dark outside! I know, the winter is coming, it's gonna be even darker outside pretty soon anyway, but why deliberately make it worse?
If it's cold outside, and we had a way of regulating the world's temperature, and someone said let's make it even colder - would we do it? Would any sane nation or person?
I used to hear, when I was a kid, that the farmers had something to do with this - but I never got exactly why the farmers cared about so much about getting an extra hour of light in the morning, anyway. The crops and the cows couldn't care that much, one way or the other. (My wife just told me that the farmers were responsible for Daylight Savings time - ok, so maybe this change tonight is not their fault. Whose fault is it, then? What constituency is Congress trying to serve here?)
The deeper point is that we shouldn't be messing around so much with time ... it's unhealthy, as any time traveler can tell you...
Or, if we do, let's extend the daylight even more. Let's have as much sunlight as we can in the early evening...
And if we're a little more tired in the morning? Go off someplace quiet, if you can, take a little catnap, and dream of how nice the snow will look all agleam and beautiful in six o'clock sun...
my 5-minute podcast on the subject
See also How to Make a Clock Run Backwards
Many of my posts here are cheerful ... I especially like being cheerful about television because it irritates so many people... But with my clocks soon to fall back an hour, as per Eastern Standard time, I gotta say that I really can't stand Standard time.
It's not that I don't like standards (well, actually, I'm no big fan of them either, if you'd like to know). But what aggravates me no end is how early it gets dark when we shift to Standard time.
Some people - including my wife - think the too-early fall of night is well worth the extra hour of sleep in the morning. I never get enough sleep anyway. An hour more doesn't make much difference to me, if I'm up until 3 or 4 in the morning (as you can see by the time stamp on many of my posts).
But what I do care about is driving home in the evening - no, not even evening, more like late afternoon - and it's pitch dark outside! I know, the winter is coming, it's gonna be even darker outside pretty soon anyway, but why deliberately make it worse?
If it's cold outside, and we had a way of regulating the world's temperature, and someone said let's make it even colder - would we do it? Would any sane nation or person?
I used to hear, when I was a kid, that the farmers had something to do with this - but I never got exactly why the farmers cared about so much about getting an extra hour of light in the morning, anyway. The crops and the cows couldn't care that much, one way or the other. (My wife just told me that the farmers were responsible for Daylight Savings time - ok, so maybe this change tonight is not their fault. Whose fault is it, then? What constituency is Congress trying to serve here?)
The deeper point is that we shouldn't be messing around so much with time ... it's unhealthy, as any time traveler can tell you...
Or, if we do, let's extend the daylight even more. Let's have as much sunlight as we can in the early evening...
And if we're a little more tired in the morning? Go off someplace quiet, if you can, take a little catnap, and dream of how nice the snow will look all agleam and beautiful in six o'clock sun...
my 5-minute podcast on the subject
See also How to Make a Clock Run Backwards
3 comments:
Because, this is real time.
Totally agreed! I have been stewing about this all week. What sort of evil government insists on forcing seasonal affective disorder on its citizens*? Thanks for posting this.
--M
* oh right -- probably the same government that forces a needless war on its citizens
well said, m.twist!
tvoz: the essence of humanity is that we try to change reality for the better...:)
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