First item:

Here in NW Ohio we have been plunged into Stygian darkness in the mornings yet again. Last Saturday night (March 9) we were instructed to change our clocks to daylight-savings time by advancing them one hour. The good news that such an act brings is that the evening stays lighter longer; the bad news is that same hour of daylight is subtracted from the morning, so the morning remains dark for longer. This is all fine and dandy for good folk living on the Eastern seaboard where the sun rises earlier than it does around here (and probably the people there do not get up as early as do mid-westerners), so they fail to notice much of a difference. At the western edge of the time zone, however, the sun is more laggardly in its rising, so now, when it used to be coming light at 7 AM when the kids are on the streets waiting for their school buses, it is pitch black and the poor kids are set into a state of confusion. The same applies to me, whereas last week I was going to the gym as the sun was rising; now I am driving there in complete darkness. Bah! Humbug!

Who decides these things and what is the rationale? Surely it cannot be the US Congress as they are incapable of making any decision on anything it seems, especially one that concerns my convenience. So who is it-perhaps the astronomer royal, or the US equivalent, if there is one? My inquiries, admittedly desultory, among my friends and acquaintances have come up with two responses: 1) it is to benefit the farmers who need to get the cows in the right mood for milk production, or some such. However, it was never explained whether it benefited cows stationed at the eastern edge of the time zone, or the other. In the US most cows are based in Wisconsin which is in the Central Time Zone, so why visit this nonsense on Ohio residents? On reflection I think this view was the prevalent one in Britain where there is only a single time zone, anyway. 2) It is to do with energy saving, as the evenings are longer and therefore the lights can go on later and since those easterners never open their eyes until sunup anyway, the extra juice used to combat the morning darkness will be used only in western regions of the time zone, yielding a small net saving. I welcome enlightenment (pun intended) on this issue.

Second item:

Recently I was having a very pleasant dinner with a Sarasota friend when the phrase “knocked up” was used. This caught my immediate attention and I must have annoyed my dinner partner somewhat as my mind drifted from what she was saying to my private thoughts on that phrase. I was perusing the famous quotation of Winston Churchill (or was it George Bernard Shaw?) that The United States and Great Britain are two countries separated by a common language, and this particular phrase exemplifies the difference. In the US those two words taken together mean very simply that a lady has become “with child”, whereas across the pond it has the connotation of someone going to another person’s house in the morning to awaken them. In this context it is presumably derived from the times of the Industrial Revolution when the working classes did not have alarm clocks and the owner of the coal mine or the iron works, to ensure that he had the required complement of slaves for the morning shift, would employ someone to go around the neighborhood tapping on bedroom windows, often with a long pole, such as a clothes prop; thus they were “knocked awake, i.e. up”.

Speaking of Winston Churchill there are those who believe him to have been a monstrous warmonger, although personally I think that the only warmongering he did was to use every trick in the book to get Franklin Roosevelt and the United States to declare war on Germany, which eventually they did. And if he indeed was a warmonger, Churchill did a lot to redeem himself by writing the mammoth “A History of the English-Speaking Peoples” a four-volume history of Britain and its former colonies and possessions throughout the world, covering the period from Caesar’s invasions of Britain (55 BC) to the beginning of the First World War (1914). I am waiting for that more recent warmonger, code-named “W”, to accomplish an even less-than-monumental work of redemption.

Third item:

I see that the Roman Catholic world has a new Pope just in time for St. Patrick’s day; I wish him (always a him!) and his flock of non-voters, the best of luck; maybe he will be able to do something about the imposition of daylight-saving time on us poor sinners.

Happy Paddie’s!