You know this started as a joke, right?

Hang on. We are confused enough this morning without adding more. Yet. It has been quite a week. There was confusion in the Bunk Room about the DST thing when things began to stir. We are in favor of saving it in case it might be needed. After the change that will be announced after the results they want for the Election Day vote counting melee are announced.

Ben Franklin is one of our favorite Americans. His joke about adjusting the clocks to change the apparent motion of the earth’s rotation around a solar orb that is actually motionless, despite heading somewhere at vast speed summed up some of the emotion of this week in this America.

It has happened before.

The quick version is that fooling with the clocks is a matter of wartime urgency. Franklin’s joke was turned into fact in 1908 up in Thunder Bay and then by the Kaiser’s bureaucrats in Germany in 1916. The universal Horror of mass war had been underway for two years, and the prospect of eking out some minor energy savings might save lives and ensure victory over the British was attractive.

They failed to understand Franklin was joking.

That was mildly ironic like these morning things we do as a creative collective. In the dominion of Canada, our friendly neighbor to the North, the people of Port Arthur up on Lake Superior decided to take action on the joke in 1908.

They changed their clocks to squeeze a little extra daylight even the drive-in movie had only just become a possibility with the expansion of the North American Road network and decent snack-bars. Then, they changed the name of the city to something as assertive as moving time itself. Bold. “Thunder Bay!”

They are a bold lot up there on the Northwest side of the Big Lake. When groups like ours embark for Isle Royal just south of the dividing line between nations. The west coast of the Lake is just at the northwestern horizon, and the big freighters bringing the iron ore down to the old manufacturing centers of the Rust Belt are bright blips along the gray-blue crescent of water that joins our northern sky.

In the United States, there was action to save daylight in both the World Wars, but the matter was dropped after the wars were over. People with good ideas eventually prevailed and the clocks began going forward in Spring and falling back in Autumn. The people, largely of Maricopa county in Arizona understood something was funny about Mr. Franklin’s proposal. Forty years ago, they decided to stop messing around with the clocks and began to mess with other things that we will talk about sometime after midnight Tuesday morning.

The technical advance in progress relieved some of the stress at Socotra Headquarters. The wrist-mounted devices all changed themselves. The two clocks in the conference room have been re-set to something closer to where at least the minute hands agree with Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), our universal signal for when to do ordinary stuff. Which we think isn’t GMT these days, since that would reflect the Imperial bias of a small observatory north of London.

UCT is the one that has banished colonial bias. We think. We have elected to just go with what is on the wrist and fully intent to update the one in the Panzer if we get out there on the supply trip to top off supplies before the other big change on Tuesday.

We were surprised to see some of the candidates out on the pavement yesterday. Having voted weeks ago, we have already fallen forward on that matter, regardless of the equinox. We have accepted the views of celebrities previously unknown about crucial issues we are only vaguely familiar.

So, things are normal and we intend to remain unchanged on that.

Haircut, wine, smokes and grits are on the menu for this morning if there is time. Then we are going to fall back you know? We will keep out heads up, though. It only makes the same sort of sense as changing the clocks to alter the motion of the heavens.

Copyright 2024 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com