THE PREMISE

A couple of years ago, on a bright March day, my buddy Elvis (Andy Parkhill) & I were grumbling about the fact that we were about to lose an hour's sleep, thanks to Daylight Savings Time. Apparently Elvis was taking it much more seriously than I, because he was becoming vehemently agitated over the matter, and exclaimed that he wasn't gonna do it! He wasn't gonna wake up an hour early, only to still be late for everything because he had to spend another hour trying to remember where all of his clocks & watches were so that he could move all of them ahead an hour!

("Male Bonding" Side-Rant) I egged him on, pretending to care. Of course, at the time I couldn't have cared less, but male bonding is the thing he & I hold paramount. Without it, we are lost. Without it, all men are lost. Without male bonding, each of us would have to face life for what it is -- a big, scary, paradigm-shifting bogey man. With male bonding, however, we are guarded by our mutual vision that we are omniscient, that we are omnipotent, that we are virile, that we are just. (Here endeth side-rant # 1.)

Anyway, like I said, Elvis was pissed off that he had re-learn how to programme his VCR. Over time, by degrees, I came to take the matter even less seriously, and he cooled down significantly after his third coffee on the fourth day. Still, we both arrived at the inescapable conclusion that Daylight Savings Time is a pox on all mankind, and that the quest for its panacea must be ours.

("Time Zones" Side-Rant)Now don't go thinkin' I'm okay with all this Time Zones twaddle either! What a load o' crap! Nothin's worse than tryin' to figure out what time the US bombed Iraq, or tryin' to calculate the exact moment the millennium turned! Why can't there just be one time? People in Greenwich (wherever the hell that is) will know that 6:00 am is wake-up time, folks here in Toronto will know 6:00 am is mid-day, and someone somewhere in the middle of the Pacific will just have to get used to the fact that 6:00 am is supper time! (This brings to a conclusion, side-rant # 2.)

("Canada vs USA" Side-Rant)Embarrassingly for me, according to Canadian history, a Canadian (Sir Sanford Fleming) forged the whole blasted idea of standardized time zones! According to Americans, however, the important part is that the whole shovel-full o' dung was propsed at the International Prime Meridian Conference in Washington. Then again, there are many "It was a Canuck!", "No! It was a Yank!", "No! It was a Canuck!" quarrels goin' around. Superman was first doodled-with here in Canada, by a Canadian (Joe Shuster), but it wasn't 'til he moved to Cleveland (I've met a lot of fine folks in Cleveland!) that he collaborated with an American writer (Jerome Siegel), and the completed Superman persona (as we now know him) emerged. Then there's the basketball squabble. Basketball was invented by a Canadian living in the States. Man o' man! My day's just not complete if I don't hear about some lame Can-Am oppugnancy! Hey, here's a thought. From this point on, I'll be sure to use words which are common in Canada, but not common in America. To be fair though, I'll provide American translations. (Thanks for patronizing side-rat # 3.)

Anyway, back to Daylight Savings Time -- the real nemesis. Not every part of the world observes it, and there are even variations! In the good old US of A, for example, Arizona, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and part of Indiana don't use it. That's right, I said part of Indiana! How screwed-up is that?!? Even here in Canada, Saskatchewan doesn't participate.

Oh yeah, Daylight Savings Time. (Sorry, but I'm easily distracted.) My point regarding some places observing it, and some not, is that you just can't keep track. Even if anyone could figure out the time difference between Sierra Leone and Moose Jaw, they'd have one hell of a time trying to compensate for the fact that one, or maybe both of them, are un-gullible enough not to bother with Daylight Savings Time!

THE PLEASANT SURPRISE

It was a Saturday night in the autumn (USA=fall) of 1998. I was supposed to help my girlfriend move the next morning at 9 o'clock. Remembering "the Elvis situation" from a couple of years earlier, I'd decided to not "fall back". (Is that a North American expression? "Spring forward --- Fall back" reminds you which way to move your clock.) Sunday morning, I slept-in 'til (by my unchanged watch) 9 o'clock. But wait! I knew I had to help with the move at 9 o'clock, yet I'd just gotten up without a morsel of remorse! It didn't take me long to realize the psychological advantage I'd just concocted over reality. I knew I'd make it on time, even though I still had to grab a shower and stop at the drive-through Tim's (USA=Dunkin' Donuts). Even though I knew I'd had just as much sleep as everyone else, I somehow thought I must have been better rested: It was almost as if I'd actually had an extra hour's sleep. (According to the Todd Rundgren lyric, "I want to believe it so badly I deceive myself, forgetting reality." ) Anyway, everyone arrived at 9 o'clock, except me. I got there, by my watch, at 10 o'clock! What a coup! I surmised, and bragged, that I was starting an hour later than everyone else, even though we all laid hands to chesterfield (USA=couch) at exactly the same moment! They, thinking they could tease me out of my blissful self-delusion, tried to make me feel guilty for starting work an hour late. It didn't work. I felt so good, due to my imaginary extra sleep, that it just rolled off my back. I retorted that they were just grumpy from waking up so early, and jealous because I'd arrived an hour later than they, and yet at exactly the same time.

Time passed. We worked.

Everyone else, now trying to use my loose logic against me, almost had me believing I'd still be working for an hour ('til 2 o'clock by my watch, 1 o'clock by theirs) when they were relaxing with a two-four (USA=case of 24 bottles of beer). I knew I had to do something, and I knew I had to do it fast. Then, it hit me! At the exact moment we finished the move, I "fell back"! The ultimate coup de grâce! I'd slept in, shown up an hour late but on time, done as much work as anyone else (You'd have to know me to know what a ridiculous claim that is.), and finished at the same "solar" time. They'd laboured from 9:00 to 1:00 (4 hours), and I'd only gone from 10:00 to 1:00 (3 hours)! What an epiphany! Who cares that it's all a lie?! Moving day sucks, and it always seems to take much longer than your watch says anyway. No harm done, right?

THE EXTRAPOLATION

Okay. Here are a three ideas for how you can use extrapolations of this same strategy to transform your own life. You're welcome.

a) Do exactly what I did and make moving day easier. Of course, this'll only work if moving day is on the first day of Standard Time.

or,

2) Refuse to "fall back" .......... for a while. Instead, just re-adjust your thinking while your scheme builds steam. Instead of working 9-5, just think of yourself as working 10-6. Who's business is it if you work the same shift as your counterpart in an office one time-zone to the east as long as you show up & leave at the same time as your counterpart one desk to the left?! You're still just an honest, hard-working, 8-hour-a-day joe who pays his taxes and chips in to the office hockey (USA=basketball) pool. Instead of going to bed at 11 and waking up at 7, sleep from midnight to 8. Eight hours of well-deserved sleep and "Bob's your uncle" (USA="you're done").

Here's the best part. When New Year's Eve rolls around, you'll reach the new year exactly one hour before everyone else in your time zone! Hooray! Cheers! Resolution! Smooch!

Do it now! Quick! "Fall back"! See?!! Now, in exactly 59 minutes, you get to do it all over again! Hooray! Cheers! Resolution! Smooch! Wow! I wish I'd had this page up & running in time for the millennium so I could have Pied Piper'd a bunch of you into doing this with me for Y2K!

(This is where "Daylight Savings Time" originally ended, but, as Hunter S. Thompson once wrote, "It just hasn't gotten weird enough for me.")

("1751 Got Gyp'd" Side-Rant) Britain and her colonies (including Canada & America) used to use the "Julian" calendar, and celebrated New Year's on March 25. (Yep. March 25. It's a long story.) Well, the Gregorian calendar was adopted over the Julian calendar in1752, and the date on which the new year was celebrated was changed from March 25 to January 1. The day following December 31, 1751 was decreed to be January 1, 1752. Also, another switch, which was legislated at the same time (to make up for previous leap year miscalculations), eliminated eleven days from September of 1752, so, September 2 was followed by September 14.

What's all this mean? Well, to me, it means a few VERY significant things. For example, it means that 1751 came into this world THINKING it was going to be a leap year (March 25 to March 24 being its Julian year, including a "leap" February for its 11th month). It entered history full of that certain pride that only 25% of all years feel. Well, posthumously, it ended up having only 281 days, although by reverse-extrapolation to the BC/AD flip, 1752 "claimed" that 1751 had 365 days all along, not even mentioning the fact that 1751 had just been screwed out of its Feb 29 leap day! Who took it? I'll tell ya who took it my friends! It was 1752! You killed 1751! You bastard! In shifting the new year from March 25 to Jan 1, it STOLE February 29 from poor, little (and getting smaller by the moment)1751! On behalf of 1751, I AM INCENSED! It lost in the "New Years' Day" shift, it lost in the "leap year" fix, and it lost in the "leap month" swop!

Why should we care? Well, suppose you're doing homework, or working on your family tree. Well, if you're research includes England or one of her colonies, you'll probably find that no-one was born on any date from Jan 1, 1751 to Mar 24, 1751, inclusive. Why? Because those days didn't exist! Don't believe me? Here's the proof:

THE PROOF
First Day of the Year	Last Day of the Year	Comments
March 25, 1749	March 24, 1749	Nothing unusual here. (Other than the fact that New Year's Day was March 25th.)
March 25, 1750	March 24, 1750	La, la la. No need to be alarmed.
March 25, 1751	Dec 31, 1751	<--- Here it is! See it? Because the date of the New Year changed from Mar 25 to Jan 1, Jan 1-Mar 24, 1751 didn't happen!
Jan 1, 1752	Dec 31, 1752	Everything "appears" to be back to "normal" ... BUT IT'S NOT, IS IT!

What if you were born before Sept 2, 1752? Well, on Sept 14 of that same year, you were only one day old! Because Sept 3-13 of that year didn't exist, thanks to the "leap year fix" I mentioned earlier. Every year, on your birthday, you'd be one-year-minus-eleven-days old, two-years-minus-eleven-days old, three-years-minus-eleven-days old, etc...

Okay, here's the bottom line on this whole "1751" thing: Years, months, days, dates, time... IT'S ALL UP FOR GRABS ... ALL THE TIME! I can see absolutely NO REASON we should have to follow rules which are so tremendously abritrary! (Am I imagining things, or does it sound like I'm trying to start a cult, here? Just to be safe, no matter what I say from this point onward, DON'T DRINK THE KOOL-AID!) (Yep. That's the end of side-rant # 5.)

Dan McLean Jr's "DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME"

Would you be interested in trying the system I've described? What was our favourite side-rant? Current Results

Well, thanks for indulging me.
Please check back occasionally,
as I'll endeavour (USA=endeavor) to spew out more nonsense.