Extended Daylight Savings Time To Doom Us All

Every once in a while, an article comes along that breaks all barriers between parody and seriousness. A reader — even a seasoned media-obsessed reader like myself — simply cannot tell if the people in the article are serious, if the writer is serious or if the article is some sort of elaborate scheme between journalist and source to make readers’ heads explode in confusion. This is one of those articles.

It’s a trick, a treat or a “nightmare.”

The government changes time.

You drive to work in darkness. You drive home in darkness.

Suddenly, child vampires and ghouls are wandering the streets before the sun goes down on Halloween.

And you spend your diminishing daylight hours changing all the clocks on TVs, VCRs, cell phones. (Don’t forget the microwave and coffeemaker.)

For the first time ever, daylight-saving time was pushed back to the first Sunday in November this year. The sun won’t set till 7:30 p.m. on Halloween. In some places, it won’t rise until 7:30 a.m.

The government says the time shift could save energy.

Area psychologists say it will also make us stressed, leave some depressed and possibly weaken our immune systems. And we might never recover.

If only we had such strong writing in the run-up to the Iraq War, maybe we wouldn’t be in this mess. The Bucks County Courier Times has given us a wonderful gift: The greatest news story of all time.

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Leftovers: With Only Oblique References To The Phillies Game

• Oh, yeah: Leave it to conservatives to protest Daylight Savings Time, as we’re not sure how much energy we save and wah wah wah. I knew I’d find an example of someone arguing against DST. [National Review Online]

• Oh. My. God. A bag. of. Puppies. I want to work at a store that sells bags of puppies. [Cute Overload]

• Even if you had a television in New York today, you still probably missed large portions of the Mets game. See, it could be worse: Your team could suck and you wouldn’t get to watch. [Deadspin]

• Not only is Chestnut Street not a dump anymore, but “the whole street is popping.” Ohh, okay. I think. [Inky]

• Apparently, the books of the effin’ Hero Scholarship have to be looked into. That seems like a good way to end the day. [The Evening Bulletin]

Why Everyone Hates Us (DST Edition)

By now, you’re probably aware that yesterday, the U.S. began Daylight Saving Time, where we all move the clocks ahead an hour in order to have more daylight during hours when people are actually awake. (If you don’t know this, you’re probably wondering why the timestamps of all these posts are off today.)

The idea was supposedly invented by Benjamin Franklin, although the article he proposed it in was a satire. So, basically, it was an idea so stupid he used it in a fake article.

Like on many things, though, Ben is wrong and DST is awesome. (You all know the famous quote of his that he was most certainly wrong on. A penny saved is worthless.) We get more light while we’re awak, making seasonal affective disorder sufferers like me less likely to cry themselves to sleep at night. (Less likely.)

Every year, they trot out people on television who are against Daylight Saving Time — Note: They might not. I’m kind of just assuming they do. — and they come up with the only valid argument against DST: It hurts farmers, since cows can’t change their internal clock.

This is a strawman argument. It seems to me any actual old-time family farmer would suck it up and just continue to do his work, the cows be damned. The real complainers are the huge factory farm corporations, which are paid by the government not to plant crops and lose an extra [x] dollars a year due to DST and just have to whine any chance they can get.

Aside from that argument, though, there’s really an imbalance, as CNN.com showed in this chart over the weekend:

Oh. It lessens crime, saves energy and reduces accidents, but, you know, I can’t remember to change my clock.

Daylight Saving Time [CNN Student News]