Timely Changes

Daylight Savings Time starts tonight at 2 A.M. in most of the United States. That means move your clocks ahead by one hour. If it seems earlier this year, it is. Congress decided a few years ago to move the time change up to the second Sunday of March, and last year was when the new rules took effect.

That's assuming, of course, that your clocks can be changed. One thing that was discovered last year was that some electronic devices simply can't be changed. They are permanently programmed to change time under the old rules, which were the LAST Sunday of March and the LAST Sunday of October.

Some people argue that changing the clocks is silly, but they're just ignorant. It magically gives farmers an "extra" hour of daylight, and that's important in an agrarian based society such as ours.

But here's a more important question: Why do we have Standard Time for only 18 weeks a year, while we have have Daylight Savings Time for 34 weeks? Doesn't "standard," by definition, mean that it is the norm and NOT the exception? So how can something that only exists approximately 35% of the time be the standard, while the exception is the rule the other 65% of the time? In other words, shouldn't the rule that is in effect almost two thirds of the year be the new Standard Time.

Of course, that raises the question of what to call the old Standard Time. Logically it should be the opposite of Daylight Savings Time, which would be Nighttime Splurging Time.

That's it. I'm writing my Congressman.