Saturday, March 11, 2017

Here's to the Drivers at the Wheel

The future arrives a little earlier this time tomorrow than it did today as we begin Daylight Saving Time. It seems to me in reading that link Benjamin Franklin may be perceived as having a hand in the development of DST. By this time tomorrow DJT will be blaming BHO for it, bigly. 

I'm never sure what to do with this extra hour of daylight I have--I'm equally at a loss as to what to invest the extra hour of sleep in at the moment in the fall when we move the clocks back. If only Bernie Madoff had expanded beyond money and into the time and space continuum, how much easier our lives might have been. Except in Arizona (most of) and Hawaii, seemingly. I'm quite taken with the "most of."

We're the only species, to my knowledge, who divides temporal moments into arbitrarily measured units. I'm especially impressed how all of us on the globe have agreed to use the same increments; none of this 'how many centimeters are in an inch or yards are needed to be a kilometer?' stuff. Sixty is sixty (at least for seconds) until and unless it gets to twenty-four (hours) though when we start rolling the hours into days and then months, the accounting gets a bit ragged.


Remember all the discussion and debate about the Social Security Lock Box a ghost of a Long-Past Presidential Campaign? Maybe we could use that for Daylight Savings Time as well. I think most of us across the globe have some form of it (hand on your heart, were you surprised to discover North Korea didn't observe it? Yeah, me neither. Perhaps the Dear Leader doesn't have a watch). 

I just gotta believe if we all put a little something into the kitty, a few seconds here and there, we'd have ourselves quite a tidy sum of minutes and hours we could redistribute to those who made a hash out of it the first time around. So what do you say, huh? 

You scoff, because you don't see a practical use for this saved time? Let's say, you want to go for a swim, but you've just eaten--one quick call to the DSTLBAC (Daylight Savings Time Lock Box Advisory Committee, 1-866-MIN-UTES) and there you go, catch a wave and enjoy. Unless you're a shark already in the ocean of course as I don't know if they have to wait after eating anyone or anything.
-bill kenny

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