Clocks ahead!

Saving daylight again.

The title of this painting is not daylight saving time.

This weekend we all have to set our clocks one hour ahead to save daylight. To be specific, we have to do it at 2AM on Sunday, March 9. I was thinking the other day how great it would be if we could do it Friday afternoon instead. Quitting time would come one hour earlier. Losing an hour of weekend isn't so great. Anyway, what follows are some things you may not know about daylight savings time, as well as my pointless digressions:

1. It's not "daylight savings time" it's "daylight saving time." No s except at the beginning of "saving." Enjoy correcting everyone you know about this for the next few days. They may end up hating you, but you'll be right, which is the next to godliness, according to the old adage.
2. In 2005, the Energy Policy Act of 2005 made daylight saving time 4 weeks longer. According to Ed Markey, a Congressional Representative (now Senator) who supported this part of the bill, this extension would "save 100,000 barrels of oil a day, reduce crime, lower traffic fatalities , and increase economic activity." I'm thinking we should just extend daylight saving time indefinitely, eventually reducing our oil consumption, crime, and traffic fatalities to zero (maybe even sending them into the negatives? We'd be creating oil!) and pushing economic activity ever upward toward infinity. It's a no brainer, really.
3. Meanwhile in Kazakhstan in 2005, they abolished daylight saving time altogether. Do they know something we don't?
4. Germany began observing daylight saving time in 1916, and the rest of Europe followed shortly thereafter, but the United States didn't do it until 1918 (in a very haphazard fashion until the Uniform Time Act of 1966, pretty interesting actually).
   Oh really? Well guess what, Europe? Ben Franklin had the idea waaaayy back in 1784 (according to a Congressional Research Service report released by Wikileaks). So there. U-S-A, U-S-A. But maybe not "U-S-A" because the US Constitution didn't come into effect until 1789. But still: Ben Franklin.