I find myself once again marveling at the idiocy that is daylight savings time. This past weekend, we got our hour of sleep back, and my body clock returned to normal for the first time since last spring. If you're like me, when you hit about age forty, your body simply stopped adjusting to this brutal and arbitrary annual change, and decided that if you're stupid enough to live in a society that adopts such a ridiculous idea, then you'll have to live with the internal consequences. As a result, I find myself in a fog for, thanks to President George W. Bush, now a full seven months every year.<br />
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Believe it or not, the idea for daylight savings time came from a New Zealand entymologist, who wanted more time after work to collect bugs. Starting in 1916, the Germans and their allies were the first to incorporate a form of daylight savings time as a way to conserve coal during wartime.<br />
Indeed, that's the argument that President Bush used to extend daylight savings time in 2005. The idea is, that since we tend to sleep past sunrise, we'd use less electricity if it were brighter longer in the evening. <br />
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Well, here's the problem. Now, we're RISING before the sun, and using more electricity then. Subsequent energy surveys tell us that there is NO substantial benefit in terms of saving electricity by messing with our clocks twice a year. That procedure, by the way, costs us five hundred million and a billion dollars each year, according to a 2007 study by the Christian Science Monitor. <br />
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Take THAT inconvenience, and add in the amount of groggy, sleep-deprived <br />
commuters that then clutter our roadways, and if they're like me, continue to be groggy until the end of Daylight Savings Time finally rolls around. This leads to accidents, sometimes with horrible results. A 2009 study also determined that most workers sleep 40 minutes less on the Sunday evening after the time shift, and are more prone to work-related accidents.<br />
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Farmers used the sun in the past to regulate their work days as well, so daylight savings time was a good idea for them. But my friend James Allen reminds me, tractors have headlights now. And now, even the farmers complain about the switch, because dairy cows steadfastly refuse to observe the changing clock.<br />
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Daylight savings time benefits golf complexes and other outdoor activities, but damages entertainment industries like theaters and television networks.<br />
And here's the long and the short of it. In a world where government is more and more intrusive, wanting to regulate even our consumption of soft drinks, I resent them arbitrarily telling me when it's time to get up.<br />
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Well, I'm taking action. I hereby refuse to acknowledge or adhere to Daylight Savings Time. From now on, when daylight savings time rolls around, I'll just drive my kids to school at 6:15 instead of 7:15. I'll show up for work at 9:30, not 10:30 and go home at 5:30, not 6:30. I'll watch "Once Upon a Time" at 7 instead of 8. And I'll leave my clocks alone. Take that, you New Zealand bug catchers!<br />
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