Sunday, March 14, 2010

Here's to the struggles of the silent war

The future arrived a little earlier this morning than it did this time yesterday. 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 and Hawaii, seemingly.

We're the only species, to my knowledge, that divides temporal moments into arbitrarily measured units. I'm especially impressed that 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 until and unless it gets to twenty-four though when we start rolling it into months, the accounting gets a bit ragged.

Remember the Social Security Lock Box as one of the ghosts of a Presidential Campaign Past? 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) and I have to believe if we all put a little into the kitty, we might 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.

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 of course-and living in Sherwood Forest. I don't know if they have to wait after eating anyone or anything.
-bill kenny

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