Quit trying to kill me, Daylight Saving Time

Confused American, vulnerable to attack

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/10/health/10real.html?em
A few days ago, some friends of mine were discussing the origin of Daylight Saving Time, just after winning a Thick Glasses Competition and directly before penning a letter to the editor of Scientific American about poor grammar choices in the Energy Efficient Seed Distribution Methods article. Some quick googling revealed that DST (as it is termed by experts in the field of knowing what time it is) was first proposed by eminent nerd Benjamin Franklin. As wikipedia so eloquently puts it, Franklin was:

"A noted polymath...a leading author and printer, satirist, political theorist, politician, scientist, inventor, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat. "

I don't know what a "polymath" is, but from the rest of that sentence I'm going to infer that it means "person who needs a lot of goddamn attention plus maybe a nap and should probably calm the fuck down." I read the rest of/part of the rest of the article, and although I'm not a licensed historian yet, but I'm going to go ahead and try to provide a picture of the initial momentous Daylight Saving Time Invention:

BF: Hey! I think I just discovered electricity, using only a kite!
BF: Hey did you know I can play three instruments? Oh, also, I invented bifocals during lunch.
BF: Hey- over here! I just helped found a liberal democratic nation that will someday rise to become the world's only super power!
BF: Um, guys? I think I have another one of my great ideas, it's called Daylight-
Everyone else in the world: Shut the fuck up, Benjamin Franklin. We're not doing that.

So basically, Daylight Saving Time got put on the back burner for a couple hundred years because, seriously, we get it Ben. You're mad important. That doesn't mean the nation's clocks should revolve around some whackjob time travel madness you came up with on your last opium trip.

Following the Great American Shootdown of DST, everything was peachy for a while, until those World Wars happened. With the President distracted by Germany suddenly wanting to be Big Germany, he didn't have time to notice the traitorous introduction of DST, probably by the sneaky interred Japanese-Americans, or maybe the even sneakier non-interred Italian-Americans. Pretty soon the entire country had acquiesced to the demands of DST, winding their clocks forward and back haphazardly as though DeLoreans need not factor into the time travel equation, producing nationwide confusion, lethargy and crankiness. Unfortunately for Hitler and his Honey I Blew Up the Country plan, we still managed to invent nuclear weapons, which more or less counteracted the minus one hour of shut-eye. Good effort, though.

After the war, we were really busy getting crunk and celebrating how we blew up pretty much everyone in Japan, so we had to have the baby boom, and then hippies, and then Wall Street booms, and then a lot of Op Ed pieces about what it means to be the world's only important country and what are our responsibilities to the other, not important countries. So that brings us up to today, when we finally looked around and were like, dude. What's this Daylight Saving thing. I just lost an hour of sleep, and since I already lost my job, house, marriage, and sense of entitlement this week, I am really sensitive about losing shit right now. I mean, I don't know anyone who particularly liked the concept to begin with, but these days even the nytimes wants you to know DST is health hazardous. In their words:

Daylight saving time is associated with sleep disruptions and possibly more serious consequences.

Yeah, if that were an advertisement for Ambien or Valanoz or Somatron or Glazeymax, I'm pretty sure the FDA would slap them with an EXPLAIN YO' SIDE EFFECTS fine faster than you can say "erections lasting 4 hours or longer." Whatever these "more serious consequences" may be, I say we pre-emptively strike the shit out of them, as we Americans so enjoy doing, with a return to sanity, and to one hour ago. Although let's hold out until the weekend. I have a lot of seed distribution methods to try out this Friday night.