Just saw we’re going to lose an hour this weekend. Won’t get it back for 8 months! Man, I HATE Daylight Savings Time. I blame Trump. SAD!
— Brad Warthen (@BradWarthen) March 9, 2017
And that’s all I’ve got to say about that….
I’d be willing to do it to whip the Hun, but that’s about it…
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Fine, once we get past Sunday, let’s leave the time there. We can change the name from “EDT” to “EST” and actually have some daylight in the winter.
NOOOOO!
The hours of the day have no meaning unless noon occurs when the sun is at its highest!
I LIKE seeing the sun go down, because that means it’s time to stop and rest. Or that, if you’ve got to work awhile longer, you’ve really EARNED your rest when you do stop.
And I truly hate getting up in the dark.
Remember, you can’t do yard work in the dark. That’s a GOOD thing.
But even when I’m doing something fun, just having a blast, I find sundown welcome.
When we were in England in winter several years back, we thoroughly enjoyed each day. But after walking miles and miles and seeing and doing so much fun stuff, it was kind of a relief when it got dark by 4 p.m. Time to think about where to get dinner, maybe stop at the pub for a pint or two, then get ready for bed and get an early start the next morning…
You don’t have to go to England for that, just go north 3-400 miles.
No, you’d have to farther than that. You’d have to go well up into Canada. England is WAY far north…
I grew up in the upper midwest, believe me… it gets dark at 4:00 in the winter and stays light until 10:00 in the summer.
http://www.livescience.com/42148-winter-solstice-sunrise-and-sunset-times-in-u-s-cities-infographic.html
Well all right, then.
But I’m not sure why that would be, since it’s so far south of England.
Can any geographers help us out here?
Didn’t you live in Memphis? Can’t be that much different than Nashville from the chart.
Memphis is about as far north as Charlotte; Nashville’s about like Raleigh.
I lived for many years in Jackson, on the road between the two and closer to Memphis. And I think it was a little colder than Memphis — sort of the way Greenville gets snow when we do not…
“Jackson”, did you play the Johnny Cash song when returning home?
Having lived there, and my wife and three oldest children having been born there, makes that song one of my Johnny Cash favorites.
It’s funny because of the subtle thing the song says about country folk in that part of Tennessee, something you’d have to have lived around there to pick up on.
Johnny and June portray Jackson as being something like Sodom and Gomorrah, or at least Las Vegas. Sin City, a place where you’d only go if you were planning on running wild.
When we lived in West Tennessee, we ran into folks in Jackson who were afraid to venture into Memphis. And if they had to go there, they didn’t do so without a gun in the glove compartment. My wife had grown up in Memphis, and we’d both attended college there, and we found that rather hilarious. Yeah, there were dodgy neighborhoods in Memphis, but it was ridiculous to be afraid of the whole city.
Even more absurdly, when I went and worked in the paper’s Gibson County bureau for a little over a year — my office was about 30 miles from Jackson — we learned that folks out there and in the other more rural counties that I covered, people had the same fear of going to Jackson, which was really laughable….
By the way, Carl Perkins was from Jackson, and still lived there when we were there.
His biggest hit, “Blue Suede Shoes,” was based on an incident that he witnessed at a dance on the unfashionable south side of Jackson. There was this jerk who made a scene accusing his date of, quite literally, stepping on his blue suede shoes while dancing…
And when you’re in England in summer, it’s still gloaming past 10 p.m.
DST’s time has passed. Go on Zulu time for the whole world.
Yes!
Which means right now it is 18:43 Zulu, or GMT for civilians.
Time for a pre-dinner drink or two, if you ask me…
Oops! I forgot to include the obligatory picture of me standing astride the Prime Meridian itself, in the English rain, right after sundown sometime before 1600 Zulu.
I’m with Karen, the summer reset ought to be the “real” time all year ’round.
Argghhh!
This discussion has moved in an unforeseen, alarming direction!
Daylight Savings Time is the best! I love getting home after work and having some daylight left. I can toss the baseball in the backyard with Henry, enjoy some time sitting on my back deck, etc.
I’m totally fine with it being dark in the morning. The mornings are all business: Get dressed, get the kids dressed, get to school, go to work. Holystoning the decks can occur in the early morning without the benefit of the late afternoon sun.
I’m DST’s #1 fan. If there was a fan club, I would be the President.
A president who is DST’s No. 1 fan?
First Trump, now this…
Just then, to myself, I cried out “Do I need THIS?!?!” in the voice of a sports copy editor I worked with in Wichita in the mid-80s.
To fully get it, you have to imagine it’s in an overwrought moan that would sound right coming from an old Catskills comic.
For instance, moments before the last pages were supposed to be sent to press around 1 a.m., he might cry out, “They’re going to extra innings! Do I need THIS?!?!”
Anyway, it was funny to me because I was there…
Oh, here’s something y’all might actually find funny, knowing me…
I was the paper’s news editor in those days, meaning that I was strictly speaking just the supervisor of the news copy desk, the national desk, and the designers who produced the live news pages — and the guy who decided what went on the front page, and how to play it.
But after 6, when all the editors who outranked me were gone, I was in charge of the whole newspaper.
So… the guys in charge of the sports desk would come to ME, and ask me what to do — whether to wait for a late-ending game, or whether a development warranted pulling a story out to their section front, or whatever.
I could have said, “What do I know from sports? Do I need THIS?!?!”
But that would have been poor leadership.
I would just give them an answer, and they’d go away satisfied. It never occurred to them that they knew 100 times more about sports than I did. Or maybe it did, and they were just happy to have someone else take the responsibility — which I never minded doing…
No, I mean president of the daylight savings time fan club.
Got it. I was just riffing on, like, ANOTHER problem “president?”
Not funny? OK. How about, “Who are the ad wizards who came up with THIS one?”
If “noon” is when the sun is at its zenith, just make it a shifting time like sunset and sunrise. Seriously, the world is way past time zones and “local time.” Go Zulu.
OK, OK, OK, as Joe Pesci would say.
So NOBODY’S with me on hating DST with a passion.
How about just hating the time when we make the switch? Karen sounds like she might go along with that, since she (and Mark) favor (shudder!) doing DST year-round.
But see, that’s no solution. You’d still have to make the switch once, and then the universe would be out of whack, and you’d OWE me a switch back, so I can regain my hour. It’s simple justice.
Or just don’t make the switch this weekend at all. Don’t load yourselves up with that karma to begin with.
Besides, we tried year-round DST in the winter of 1974-75. Some of you are too young to remember that, I suppose. For my part, I was (just barely) an adult at the time.
Anyway, we tried it once, and dropped it like a hot potato.
What’s the use of us grownups going through such horrible experiences, if y’all aren’t going to learn from our suffering?
I’m with you. I hate it too. The waning light is my cue to start doing my night time routine things and I still have the same amount of them to do so starting them later makes me go to bed later which just makes me tireder the next day and/or run out of time to get my stuff done. And I’m just frustrated and cranky.
Yes! THANK you, Scout. Finally, something I can agree with!
One needs time for one’s night things.
I like the night life. I got to boogie.
I threw that quote in for Bud, because he likes disco. Not because I really like to boogie. The night is for winding down, perhaps for a bit of quiet diversion — exercising (I’m about to get on the elliptical now) reading, watching a movie or an episode or two of a TV series.
I went to a disco or two in the 70s. I did not boogie. And I’ve seldom felt so out of place in my life.
I did stand up once with a young lady, to be polite. But “boogie” would not describe what I did.
Weird story, really… I was traveling with Lamar Alexander when he was running for governor, and someone had the bright idea of taking this Pat Boone-like Republican to campaign at a black disco in a part of Nashville he would not ordinarily frequent. Not much of a disco — more of a dive bar with a tiny (like 8 feet square) dance floor fenced off in the middle. There was no speaking, just hanging out. I was sitting with some of his aides — who really stuck out in the place (like “Otis, my man!”) having a beer, and I ended up standing up to dance with one of the young women, at her suggestion. Maybe she thought it would help us fit in. It did not.
Awkward on several levels.
I don’t remember Lamar trying to dance. That would have been something…
I think I had taken this picture of Lamar in his plaid shirt earlier that same day, and in that same part of town. You’ve got to hand it to Lamar — uber-white Republican, alumnus of the Nixon White House — for trying to campaign in a black precinct.
You don’t see much of that now…
It’s really a shame we didn’t have the technology we have now back in my brief reporting career, before I became an editor permanently (starting in 1980).
I would surely have shot some video of the Alexander folks dancing at the black disco.
Sometimes, when I reminisce here about things I experienced way back then, it’s out of frustration — it would have been awesome to have had a blog. Out on the road covering that campaign, I would have had 10 times as much to write as what I had room for in my one campaign story a day — which was always dominated by the one most newsworthy thing the candidate had said or done within the cycle.
Little things like… meeting Vernon Jordan, then head of the National Urban League. Lamar and I were walking down the hall between banquet rooms of the Maxwell House hotel in Nashville when we ran into him, and Alexander introduced me to him — long before he was as famous as he would be during the Clinton presidency…
Adding some fuel to Brad’s fire about disliking DST: In 1999, researchers at Johns Hopkins University and Stanford wanted to find out what happens on the road when millions of drivers have their sleep disrupted by the time change. Analyzing 21 years of fatal car crash data from the US National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, they found a very small, but significant, increase of road deaths on the Monday after the clock shift in the spring. The number of deadly accidents jumped to an average of 83.5 on the “spring forward” Monday compared with an average of 78.2 on a typical Monday.
The study did not find evidence of increased crashes on the Sunday daylight saving time begins, perhaps because people can sleep in that day. The researchers postulate that people are still sleep-deprived on Monday because they’re still adjusting to the shift in time — as they would for jet lag.
Excellent points!
From now on at this time of year, I’ll add “deadly” to my list of epithets relating to this travesty called DST…
Hurray for DST!! When we go off DST in Nashville, sundown may be at 4:30; today the sun doesn’t set until nearly 7 PM. Since I’m badly out of shape, I need to start bike commuting again, but I hate to leave campus before 6 because of the new “It City” Nashville’s infernal traffic. I can actually *do* this (at least when the weather gets decent again–I blame Trump for *that*!).