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Saving daylight

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Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a conspiracy nut, but there’s something fishy in this DST business. We do it, presumably, in order to save an hour of daylight during, well, most of the year, it turns out.

So how did it all begin? Not really with old Ben Franklin, as some people will tell you. Some people will tell you he invented the weekend, or the iPhone, too, but you don’t believe that, do you?

In the US, it started with the Standard Time Act of 1918, which established the time zones across the country, and threw in DST as a kind of bonus (Act now, and get Daylight Savings! Limited time only!). It was the standard summer DST, although why we call it that, since it lasted seven months, is beyond me. At any rate, it was wildly unpopular, and was repealed a year later. Congress used to have good sense, once upon a time.

We thought we were done with it, then. But no. Roosevelt snuck it back in in 1942, called it War Time, and made it last all year, to boot.

Actually, year round sounds fine, kind of like an invisible dog fence, doing its job, unnoticed but eternally vigilant. Whatever its job is, anyway. Something to do with petroleum, apparently. Most evil things are linked to petroleum one way or another.

After the war, it was dropped, and summer DST was optional until the Uniform Time Act of 1966, when congress got fed up with never being able to figure out what time it was where they were going for a big rally, and made it apply to the whole country. States could opt out if the whole state did it. Indiana, where I mostly grew up, would have no part of it, for instance, although wicked conservatives recently forced it on the citizenry there. GW tacked on another five weeks in 2007, and here we are.

I tell you all this history, gleaned from painstaking research (a couple of minutes on Wikipedia), so that you’ll believe me when I tell you that when you add up all the hours saved since 1918, not even counting the 20 years after WWII when it was optional, it comes to 13,170. That’s roughly 550 days, or 78 weeks, which comes to 19 months.

That’s right, just over a year and a half of constant daylight, 24/7, night and day!

So, where did all that daylight go? Is it in some kind of federal light bank somewhere?

Why can’t we draw it out, a couple of hours at a time in the middle of winter, when we need it?

From the OPI

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Office of Perpetual Investigation
Popular Music Division

Memorandum: Purple Berries?

Here are the facts as we know them:

An unspecified number of people are leaving, because they are not needed. They are leaving by sea, on ships made of wood (very free, apparently). We don’t know how many ships, but at least two, as the plural is specified, we don‘t know the size of the ships or the crew, although both seem small, and we don’t know of a destination, although aimless roaming is strongly suggested.

We also know that at least one person has subsisted on purple berries for 6 or 7 weeks, or the better part of 2 months, and we know that a second person has requested some of the same berries, and that the request has been granted. Some questions immediately arise:

1. Where were the ships procured, and how? Were they bought, built, or stolen?
2. Where were the purple berried procured?
3. What kind of berries, purple or otherwise, were nutritious enough to sustain someone for that long, especially without “getting sick once?”
4. How were enough of them to eat for the better part of 2 months stored on what certainly appear to be small vessels?
5. How were they stored in such a way as to keep them from spoiling for such a long time?
6. What was everyone else eating, since it appears to be the first request for the berries to be shared since the departure of the ships?

Unless and until these mysteries are cleared up, I’m afraid there will be serious doubt as to the veracity of the account.

The Vegan occupation

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Something has been happening under our very noses: colonists from the Vegan star system some 25 light years away have been slowly infiltrating our planet.  They kept a low profile at first, but now they openly self-identify.  There are more and more of them; they even have their own restaurants, and even establishments specializing in normal human food now offer Vegan dishes.  The great mystery is how they have managed such a successful migration from such a great distance.

One possibility is that they began their journey thousands of years ago, and are only now arriving, but I don’t favor that.  Vega is a massive star which is only about a tenth as old as the sun.  They’re not that smart.  Besides, immigrants generally are assimilated by the second or third generation, and these have held on to their ethnic cuisine much longer than that.

The only answer is quantum entanglement.  Which means that somewhere on their home planet orbiting Vega, there is a box in which is an identical group of people, living in identical houses, and eating the same gluten-free unfried falafel wraps, drinking the same double venti no-whip soy lattes. 

You can figure out for yourself the implications of that.  For their environment at home to be identical to the one here on Earth, there must be identical humans there.  Which means they have cloned us.  Or are we the clones?  How would we know?

Why, you may ask, would they do this?  Because Vega will last only a tenth as long as the sun, that’s why.  Vegans are apparently quite prudent, and are slowly replacing us with themselves, so as not to be left without a home.

I am posting this on my blog, because I don’t believe they know I’m on to them yet.  But just in case I’m too late, they’ll find they’re not the only prudent ones.  I have appended a copy of this post to the end of the iTunes EULA agreement.

They’ll never find it there.

Notice to Consumers

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It has come to our attention that some of you have been seen engaging in activities that have little or nothing to do with consuming.  This, of course, must stop, as it jeopardizes the entire consummation system.  In the 19th century, enthusiasm for consuming was so robust that people were even reported to have died from consumption.  Are we to fail such a heritage?

Even the French have surpassed us.  There is a soup there called consommé which is quite widely used in cooking, even though, judging from the name, it has clearly already been consumed before.  Surely we can do as well or better.

If the general population fails to improve by next Tuesday, all businesses in the US will be forced to not only become French, but to move all operations involving wage earners to an impoverished country … what?  Oh, never mind.  Become French, then.

Some rank observations

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Why is the lowest rank in the army, which affords its holder no privacy whatsoever, called private? The corporal, at least, seems reasonably preoccupied with bodies. But what is a sergeant? Someone bedecked in serge? A warrant officer, I suppose, is the person in the office which processes warrants, but you’d never know it from their duties.

I get lieutenant; he’s a tenant in a place, and the captain is surely the head man. But if he’s the head man, why are there ranks above him?

To be sure, in the navy, there are fewer ranks above captain, but that’s the navy, always going their own way, doubtless from spending so much time on the bounding main, far from civilization. A friend, and ex-submariner, once told me they left port with 150 sailors, and returned with 75 couples. I guess that explains the ranks of mates; very chummy, these sailors. Perhaps it also explains admirals, presumably persons most to be admired. As for the rest of them (only some of whom are able bodied), they are seamen. Very clear and to the point, much like the airmen in the … air force. Someday soon these basic descriptive ranks will have to be modified to reflect the modern military: seapersons and airpersons.

But above the captain in the army there are majors and colonels before you even get to the highest ranks. Majors, I believe, are self-explanatory, but what on earth is a colonel? Something to do with columns? If so, why is he allowed to lord it over the head man?

The generals, those with the highest ranks, presumably do not have any specific duties, like the lower ranks, with the exception of the lowest of them, the brigadier, who mucks about with brigades. Yet they feel compelled to recapitulate practically the entire officer rank system among themselves, from lieutenant to major, skipping colonels, perhaps because generals get nowhere near any columns except during parades.

Don’t get me started on unit designations; that’s something only a very admiral general could explain.