It is a lovely pre-spring morning, though it comes with a certain chronological anxiety. It makes me savor this morning, since the light is back, at least until tomorrow, as the seasons begin their stately transition.

The Government is going to step on that, of course, since at midnight tonight we are going to set our clocks ahead an hour for some perfectly fine reasons- I am trying to think what they might be, since the Great Change causes people to be cranky from what is an essentially jet-lagged National Capital, and for them to crash their cars in the morning darkness and all that.

Old Jim has several theories on that, and is very sensitive to the amount of light available during the hours of socially acceptable drinking. We have a standard discussion about the nature of the “Longest” and “Shortest” days of the year, which are, as he notes, nothing of the sort. They are all pretty much the same, only varying seasonally about the amount of sunlight in them.

We have Benjamin Franklin to thank for Daylight savings time. During his time as Ambassador to France, he awoke one morning earlier than his custom, and marveled at the light streaming through his curtains. Ever the tinkerer, he wrote an essay that changing the clocks with the season would avail citizens of “free sunshine” for many more hours saving on expensive candles. Changing the clocks would be a net benefit to all.

Of course he wasn’t driving down to the Quai Dorsey every day, but I take his point.

There were some fits and starts and experiments on the clocks through the 19th century. The railroads had forced standardization of the time, which has developed as a wild patchwork in which adjacent jurisdictions legislated their own times. At one point there were 300 different time zones in the Continental US, and that made scheduling the trains a real problem. The Feds decreed that there would be only four in 1883, and Great Britain followed the next year, establishing the time at the Prime Meridian at Greenwich .

As usual, it was the imperative of War that drove the first attempt at establishing a seasonal adjustment to time, almost precisely for the reasons that occurred to Dr. Franklin. Conservation of energy during the brief American participation in World War One changed the clocks, though it was repealed in the plague year of 1919. The matter rested there until the second installment of our Hundred Years War, 1942 to 1945. In 1966 the United States officially adopted the Uniform Time Act, which declared that Daylight Saving Time would begin on the last Sunday of April and end on the last Sunday in October.

The Oil Shock of 1973 brought the matter up again, saving all sorts of candles, and perhaps the equivalent of 10,000 barrels of oil each day. After the energy crisis was over in 1976, the US changed their DST schedule again to begin on the last Sunday in April. DST was amended again to begin on the first Sunday in April in 1987. The last tinkering with time came in August of 2005, when President W. signed the energy policy and Defeating the Taliban Act- I am making up the second part, hahaha- which extended DST even further, from the second Sunday in March to the first Sunday in November.

Read more: http://pix11.com/2014/03/07/daylight-saving-time-2014-when-do-we-turn-our-clocks-forward-and-why/#ixzz2vNdKJ8C8

The benefits to all this are supposed to be outweighed by the advantages, but there are a lot of people not even in the Willow Bar who feel that the dark winter mornings endanger the lives of kids walking to school. Oh, throw in heart attacks, traffic accidents and a curious inability of people to use the extra time for something productive, like exercise, and instead arguing about what time it is at local versions of The Amen Corner.

We were talking about this with a new player who sat at Jim’s left, and had opinions about all sorts of things. We dubbed him “F-250 Jeff ,” and we will see whether we made the cut to make him a regular. He does the VRE commuter train out of Union Station, and had no opinions whatsoever about sobriety check-points. I will have less time than usual this weekend to investigate strategies for compliance.

So we Spring Ahead, even if I do not think that Old Man Winter is done with us just yet. Oh, yeah, Great Lakes Ice may have peaked yesterday at 92.2% coverage, and we will have temperatures in the 50s here today, and 60s tomorrow before the next chilly front comes through next week.

I am off on a winery excursion today with the Willow crowd, via hired bus. There are a variety of rules about what we can do in the vehicle, but no liability for consuming alcohol and riding as a passenger. I will have a full report for you tomorrow, unless the lack of sleep and artificial jet leg throws me off schedule.

Aside from the apparent collapse of the West, this looks like it is going to be a splendid weekend, regardless of what time it is.

Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303