Jeff Stahler for March 13, 2021

Hadn’t thought about that. If enough people make the association, maybe we will FINALLY get rid of the idiocy (and real cost, including lives) of changing the clocks twice per year.

I live in Indiana. They were one of the last states to adopt DST. Then again, Indiana is always the last at everything. Sunday beer sales. We will probably be the last state to pass mary jane laws. All the while watching the neighbor states taking the tax money with their sales.

Any perceived gain from the time change is more than offset by the disruption in sleep patterns and the general inconvenience of it all. For those who rise with the sun, they will still rise with the sun. It saves nothing and creates many headaches.

DST starts Sunday. I hate it, as does a good % of people here in “Green Country”

It’s all a matter of perspective. I get up at 5 AM, work out and then go for my walk. I like “walking from darkness into the light” at this time of year. We had a very nice sunrise yesterday.

Now I will be plunged back into total darkness for another 6 weeks while the planet catches up.

A Native American joke quips, “Only a white man can take a foot off one end of a blanket and sew it onto the other and think that he has a longer blanket.”

There is some sense to this: most people waste the extra morning daylight. Today, civil twilight (the time when it “gets light” before sunrise) was at 6:05 AM. What are most people doing at that time? Getting up and getting ready for work. So on Monday it will be about 7 AM. What are most people doing then: getting out the door to go to school / work.

Conversely, the other side of the day, it “gets dark” at almost 7 PM today, just about the time people are either eating dinner or cleaning up after it. Next week that time will be about 8 PM.

So office workers and students who have an artificial schedule get a longer “usable” day.

Trivia fact of the day: because of how the Earth orbits and its tilt, changes in the length of sunlight in a day happen most rapidly around the equinoxes (next Saturday) and most slowly around the solstices .

There is a little island in the middle of the Pacific Ocean called Marcus Island (Minami Torishima or “South Bird Island” to give it its Japanese name). It is a triangular heap of coral that has a runway on it’s longest side. The runway is 4500 feet long and runs almost the entire leg of the triangle.

In the 1980’s the island’s population was 38 people: 28 U.S. Coast Guard personnel who operated the LORAN station (1,600 foot antenna – if, in spite of its guy wires, it managed to fall over on its side, there was no way it could fall and not hit water.) who lived in the center of the island and 10 Japanese oceanographers / meteorologists who lived on the north end of the island.

In World War II, there were 5,000 Japanese soldiers stationed on the island. They must have all been standing in formation at attention. That’s the only way you could fit that many people on the island. The U.S. Forces “skipped over” Marcus during their advance.

There are two time zones on this tiny Island. The Japanese observe Japan Standard Time, while the Americans observe local time. The time zones are separated by two hours and do not depend on geography but who you ask for the time.

As I recall, American Indian tribal nations do not recognize DST. If that is accurate, they will still be on the old standard.

Why choose DST over the traditional time frame? Supposedly DST was to take advantage of an earlier sun time for what purpose I can’t remember.

It’s similar to the rationale for the 9 months school year. Reportedly done to allow children to provide farmers with more family help during growing and harvesting season. Considering how few people actually work the land anymore, why continue the current 9 month schedule? There are all kinds of models for using the quarter system.

A good argument to leave time alone lest we mess up again.

you want to see how really stupid we are as a country??? watch bill mahr’s “new rules” segment from last night’s program. that will wake you up!

One of my fondest memories was walking to school when I was in grammar school. It was about 2 miles but in the fall the sound the leaves made as we crunched thru them along with the smell of the maples was great. Sometimes my best friend and I would run the distance just to see how fast we could get to school. Now more than 65 years later I still recall those days when I walk thru them.

How did Daylight Savings Time cause the pandemic and the resulting economic problems?

It set you back a year because negligent covid spreading anti mask idiot republicans were in charge.

A blonde asked a travel agent if there really was a place called “The Land of the Midnight Sun”. Yes, he said. How did they do that ?, she asked. He said they just set their clocks ahead an hour each Spring, but NOT set them back each Fall until the Sun stayed up all night. . . . . ;-) . . . /S . . . . (Stop groaning)

I hate the time change. Just once in my life I’d like to let nature change the season not the clock. The change puts your mind and body through unnecessary trauma.