Sunday - April 03, 2005

Spring Forward

It is now 2:00am on Sunday, April 3, 2005.. This blog will now officially spring forward one hour and magically lose sixty minutes of valuable time .... tick .... tock .... tick .... tock ....

It is now officially 3:00am on Sunday April 3, 2005. Do not forget to set all of your clocks today and prepare to drink extra coffee on Monday morning.

If you’re looking for someone to blame for this atrocity, look no further than Benjamin Franklin ....

The idea of daylight saving was first conceived by Benjamin Franklin during his sojourn as an American delegate in Paris in 1784, in an essay, “An Economical Project.”

Some of Franklin’s friends, inventors of a new kind of oil lamp, were so taken by the scheme that they continued corresponding with Franklin even after he returned to America.

The idea was first advocated seriously by a London builder, William Willett (1857-1915), in the pamphlet “Waste of Daylight” (1907) that proposed advancing clocks 20 minutes on each of four Sundays in April, and retarding them by the same amount on four Sundays in September. As he was taking an early morning ride through Petts Wood, near Croydon, Willett was struck by the fact that the blinds of nearby houses were closed, even though the sun was fully risen. When questioned as to why he didn’t simply get up an hour earlier, Willett replied with typical British humor, “What?” In his pamphlet “The Waste of Daylight” he wrote: “Everyone appreciates the long, light evenings. Everyone laments their shortage as Autumn approaches; and everyone has given utterance to regret that the clear, bright light of an early morning during Spring and Summer months is so seldom seen or used”.

Daylight savings time officially first became law in the United States on March 19, 1918 by joint resolution of Congress during World War I and was later made permanent by the same group of scoundrels on January 20, 1942.

Daylight Savings Time Trivia:

Amtrak
To keep to their published timetables, trains cannot leave a station before the scheduled time. So when the clocks fall back one hour in October, all Amtrak trains in the United States that are running on time stop at 2 A.M. and wait one hour before resuming. Overnight passengers are often surprised to find their train at a dead stop and their travel time an hour longer than expected. At the spring DST time change, trains instantaneously become an hour behind schedule at 2 A.M., but they just keep going and do their best to make up the time.

Palestinian Terrorists
In September 1999, the Palestinian West Bank was on daylight saving time while Israel had just switched back to standard time. West Bank Palestinians prepared time bombs and smuggled them to Arab Israelis, who misunderstood the time on the bombs. As the bombs were being planted, they exploded—one hour too early—killing three terrorists instead of two busloads of people, the intended victims.

Note: I am actually posting this at 10:00pm Saturday night, prior to going to bed. The Expression Engine blog software, which allows me to set future datetimes for posts (causing them to magically appear here while I am elsewhere) refuses to let me set the time to 2:00am. It is as if that hour has ceased to exist in the overall space-time continuum. Cue up Rod Serling and eerie “Twilight Zone” music in 5 - 4 - 3 - 2 - 1 ....

Posted by The Skipper     on 04/03/2005 at 04:00 AM   
Filed Under: • Science-Technology •  
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Not that very many people ever read this far down, but this blog was the creation of Allan Kelly and his friend Vilmar. Vilmar moved on to his own blog some time ago, and Allan ran this place alone until his sudden and unexpected death partway through 2006. We all miss him. A lot. Even though he is gone this site will always still be more than a little bit his. We who are left to carry on the BMEWS tradition owe him a great debt of gratitude, and we hope to be able to pay that back by following his last advice to us all:

1. Keep a firm grasp of Right and Wrong
2. Stay involved with government on every level and don't let those bastards get away with a thing
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4. Keep talking to each other, whether here or elsewhere

It's been a long strange trip without you Skipper, but thanks for pointing us in the right direction and giving us a swift kick in the behind to get us going. Keep lookin' down on us, will ya? Thanks.

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