Nothing like working on work until after 10 PM and still needing to write a blog post. This has been one of those Sword of Damocles and it just took until 8:30 to fall. Still, in the grand scheme of things, I rarely have to work late and I got to do it from home tonight so all is not lost. There will be precious little creativity in this post though.
Daylight saving time happened this week and so far, none of the people I know on Facebook have killed anyone, mostly because they are too groggy and melatonin inhibited to take action. I rarely hear arguments for daylight saving time but the NY Times found at least two people who were willing to take on the task. The most novel support? Steven Calandrillo, professor of law says criminals love darkness and they also are late to bed and late to rise so eliminating one hour of darkness will lower the crime rate. Of course, it’s the same number of hours of darkness still a point apparently lost on Prof. Calandrillo. He must be running for District Attorney somewhere.
Apparently, there is a somewhat significant increase in pedestrian and cycling fatalities around the time change both in the spring and fall. This makes sense to me because had there been a cyclist in the right hand lane on my way to work yesterday doing the things cyclists often do like getting passed but then moving to the front of the line at stoplights causing us all to have to pass him again, I would have gladly run him over in my sleep deprived state. However, our professor of law uses these stats along with his assertion that it’s the change to blame to argue for keeping daylight saving time all year long. That sounds tautological to me. And it makes me homicidal.
David Gerard, economist, argues much the same thing, that it’s the change that causes the problem so we should get rid of the change by keeping daylight saving time. But if it’s the change and that change is something we artificially introduced, why not just go back to the way it was before when we all lived in caves?
Then we have our novelist who puts forth no argument at all but waxes poetically on the futility of mankind to change the world around us, comparing daylight saving time to the Panama Canal and the Hoover Dam. Of course, neither of those two things will cause me to run over a cyclist but still.
Unsurprisingly, few of these people have what many of us consider “real jobs”, the ones that require you to get up at 6 AM and be at work at 8 AM. My guess is the NY Times couldn’t find any plumbers or police officers who had MBAs and thus wouldn’t seem so fancy. In the meantime, I suppose we’re all going to have to get used to it since we can hardly expect our Congresscritters to unpass a law. Most of them have never met a law they didn’t support. It’s in their DNA. Makes ’em feel important. So we’ll just have to keep running over cyclists and drinking that extra cup of coffee in the morning. Or move to Arizona. But their legislators seem to be even more clueless.
