Perpetual Ruminations

Time For Change/All Seasons Matter

Daylight savings time is destroying the climate!

Okay, maybe not the climate, but it's sure messing up the seasons. As I see it, we have twelve months in the year, and those are divided into four seasons, spring, summer, fall, and winter. Now, I'm not a mathematician, but I can add, subtract, multiply, and divide and I'm telling you, it doesn't add up.

We should have three months of each season every year; no matter how you divide it; each season should be three months long (3 months x 4 seasons = 1 year).  You could even do it by weeks: 52 weeks in the year, or 4 seasons of 13 weeks each.  I did not factor leap years into this because it makes the formula a bit more confusing, and it would only influence the seasons by one a day a year for four years before the calendar is reset again.

So, I ask you, how is it that we end up with two weeks of spring, 18 weeks of summer, 4 weeks of fall, and 30 weeks of winter? I'll tell you why, Daylight Savings time. That extra hour of daylight results in the summers being longer! Then, they set the clocks back which results in a longer winter! Since they change the clocks in the spring and fall, these are the seasons that suffer loss.

Now, this didn't happen overnight. It took years upon years for the seasons to go spinning out of whack, and it would take just as many years for the seasons to balance again. If I remember history correctly, and I seldom do, it was Gaius Julius Abraham Lincoln Caesar who first began Daylight Savings Time. Why, he was at war with the Chaldeans and wanted to dig the Suez Canal so he could sneak up behind them, cut off their petroleum supplies, and end the war. He was in a hurry because the war was cutting into prime-time television hours and he wasn't able to watch "I Love Lucy" with his wife, and she was making his life miserable.

So, in desperation, he called Gallileo and asked him how he could get the canal dug faster. Galileo thought about this and told the Roman president to add an hour to each day so the workers could dig longer, thus finishing the canal sooner.

Anyway, that's where this all got started, and over the decades since, it has continually altered the seasons. Now, the time has come for all people to join together and demand equal time for every season!