Saving Coal

Well, I got an extra hour of sleep this morning, like at least thirty million other Canadians not including the fine people from Saskatchewan. Most of Europe employs daylight Savings time, as does Brazil and a part of Australia.

I like my sleep as much as the next guy, but this just doesn’t seem worth it. It seems like cutting a foot off the top of a blanket and sewing it to the bottom to make it bigger. Sure, in theory you get an hour extra sleep in the fall, but you lose that same hour in the spring. Depending on when you are born and when you die, it might never balance out. That would suck! I have been wondering all day just who to blame, and I just now looked it up. It is quite surprising really.

It turns out that when Ben Franklin ("Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise"),was envoy to France he wrote an anonymous letter suggesting the French should start taxing candles, window shutters and firing canons at sunrise to wake the Parisians. What a fucking dick! He was just kidding, because at the time no one was particularly concerned with being on time.  That didn’t happen until the invention of trains and train time tables.

The real culprit was a guy called George Hudson who worked shift work and wanted to have more hours of daylight to collect insects which led him to present a paper in 1895 proposing a two hour shift. The gentleman that stole credit for the idea was William Willett who noticed during a ride through London that a large percentage of Londoners slept through daylight hours in the summer. He wasn’t concerned that they were wasting the day away, he was pissed off that he had to cut his round of golf short because dusk came so early. So, it was because of this guy and I would assume other like minded golfers (that just happened to be politicians), tried to push this bill through. It wasn’t until the First World War that England and most of Europe and Russia decided that they could save a lot of coal with Daylight Savings Time. Everything always comes back to money. For a moment there I thought that golf was going to be the reason, which would have pissed me off.

Although not used by most of the world's people, daylight saving time is common in the Northern Hemisphere high latitudes.

DST observed

DST no longer observed

DST never observed

 

 

So, anyways, I did get an extra hour of sleep, but for me it has no impact because if I want to sleep for an extra hour then I just roll over and pull the covers up over my head. I suppose that those who don’t have the option of rolling over will find this a boon. To tell the truth I have never really cared about Daylight Savings Time one way or the other. I just needed something to write about tonight. Changing all of the clocks twice a year is a bit of a piss off, but if I could remember how to reset those clocks from when I did it six months ago, it wouldn’t be a problem. For me, I guess it boils down to a bad memory.

I don’t know about you, but I am stoked about how much coal I am going to save…