saving time?

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Daylight Savings Time.

What are we saving it for?

And truthfully, didn't we lose an hour today? So shouldn't it be Daylight Losing Time. That makes today only 23 hours long. I know we get it back in November when standard time reappears, but where is the return on the investment? It just makes it darker and colder earlier in the day. And doesn't Standard Time now only last four months? So why does that make it standard? It seems more part time.

You know long before there was a Daylight Savings Time and Standard Time and even time zones, there were just local times. Every city set their clocks by the sun; when it was directly overhead it was high noon. All clocks in the city were set to match. So noon in New York City arrived roughly 40 minutes before noon in Knoxville, where I live. But why should I care when it's noon in the Big Apple? I'm not there, I'm here.

Call me a Luddite, but why do we even need clocks? High noon is high noon, all you have to do is look to the sky to determine it. Even the pre-Luddite Maya knew that. In fact, it's easy to tell dawn, sunrise, mid-morning, high noon, afternoon, sunset, dusk just by looking out the window. You sleep when it's dark, and get up with the sun. Nights are longer in the winter, so you get to sleep more. But it's often too cold to do anything else.

Didn't that system work for millennia?

As Uncle Buck used to say, "If it's not broke, don't fix it."

-Resource: for more time talk, look for the wonderful book, "Turn and Jump: How Time and Place Fell Apart" by Howard Mansfield.

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