This was a horrible weekend for Ure’s truly.
It wasn’t the rain, although we have had about 8.3-inches of the stuff since the hurricane remnants blew through here last week – and in fact there are still some low-lying parts of Texas with standing water from it.
Nor, was it the bother of Halloween. We are so far out at the ‘end of the string’ that we have never in the 12-years we have been here, had a single door-knocker asking for a sugar rush.
Admittedly, I thought about dropping by my dentist’s place to knock, but it’s a long drive and I’m lazier than it seems.
Similarly, my anguish was not sitting in front of a computer trying to correct errors in my novel. Like the Herculean task of cleaning out the stables of the gods, this just seems to go on, and on, and on… The pass through the book this weekend was to remove a number of “F”-bombs” – though the people in the book still use the eff-word. It just sounds less like a pimp convention and more like television.
This weekend also saw the spacing of chapter titles repaired and typically George-like sentences (that can run a paragraph or two between periods) broken up into as many as five smaller sentences.
Several of the early readers mentioned that. Fine.
None of these items was hard to deal with. At least if you’ve had a decent night’s sleep. Which, in turn, gets us to the point.
In theory we should all have had an extra hour of sleep on Sunday morning. Not here, though.
I made the mistake of thinking the problem through and decided to stay up an hour later on Saturday night so I would wake naturally an hour later.
No. The Circads – a tribe of vicious trolls that owns the Circadian Rhythm franchise – wouldn’t stand for it.
They ensured that I still woke up at exactly 4:00 A.M .(*which is now 3:00 A.M.) and that was that. Result? I was tired all day Sunday because in reality I’d only gotten seven-hours of sleep.
I even went to far as to spill a whole cup of coffee on my computer keyboard to prove how incapacitating the whole sham of made-up time is. The Circads laughed their asses off.
This morning, it’s even worse. I stayed up until 8:30 last night. All to no avail. The “alarm brain” went off at 3:00 A.M. regardless. When I explained to myself that the clock works the other way and could I go back to sleep until the old 5 A.M. the logical brain spooled up and a half-hour discussion of the silliness of made-up time followed. Mental brick-bats were flying until the reset alarm finally ended 12-rounds of despair.
Elaine and I have done a good bit of traveling over the past 15+ years. On the east coast, life is really good because when the ‘alarm brain’ goes off, it is a reasonable hour. Our hotel, for example, when we went to the National Newspaper Columnists convention in Hartford a couple of years back, was serving breakfast when the mid-column munchies showed up. Marvelous thing, that.
On the other hand, here in a week-and-a-half, we are off to the wilds of Las Vegas, where the clocks will be two hours against me.
The Circads have promised I will still be getting up at the same time. But the city around me won’t. When I publish at our customary 8 A.M. time here (Central time) Las Vegas is still trying to figure out where to plug in the coffeemaker. The Circads are deeply offended and promise revenge.
The senseless ad-hoc adjusting of time from “standard” to “daylight savings” should be done away with. Give the Circads their due.
If kids need a little more light, then start school later – and hold the same time year round.
I’ve often wondered about the problems alternate-reality time causes in law enforcement. And which 2 A.M. did the bars close by Saturday? The Circads have kept me tied up and unable to venture out to investigate. Like Gulliver and the Lilliputians, the Circads are more clinical in their application of misery.
If the people in Aridzona was another couple of hours to BBQ, then let them take off work early. Go in early to make up for it. Just don’t shovel it off my me! If there is more danger driving at night, then start work later. How hard is that?
You see how this works? Let’s stop kidding ourselves. We’re already a nation of deluded idiots (look who we put in office if you don’t believe it).
Look at Big Ben sometime.
The British used their “royal powers” to decree the hour of the day so in addition to a big noisy clock, they also proclaimed the “prime meridian” to run through the nation, as well. It’s all a head trip.
Do you really think when TSHTF that clocks will matter? Know of any prepping articles on “how to keep time going past the revolutionary collapse?” Not no. Hell no.
The heck of it is that the swifty-Brits with their time scams have ensnared virtually all chart makers to this day with their pompous, measure everything this far West of Greenwich or that far East FMTT…doesn’t anyone besides me see it? It’s all a power trip.
Think about it from a marketing standpoint, it gives the British much credit for being the center of the “time-verse” that is no longer deserved.
I will grant you that running the longitude would not have been possible without John Harrison’s remarkable contribution of the H5 chronometer. A fine thing from a self-educated carpenter and clockmaker.
You’ll notice that he was not royal when he worked his greatness. We see (in marketing terms) however, how often when someone does something exceptional, the royals “invite people into their club.” Harrison received the Copley Medal. As far as I know, he didn’t even get a “Sir” out of it. Conversely, Alan Greenspan was knighted. There! That reveals something about how the club works.
I’d like to propose two things to you this morning: First that daylight time go down the road. That should be simple enough. Then secondly,. we could light off a huge worldwide economic flurry by moving the international date line where it belongs: Out in the middle of a non-partisan ocean somewhere so that one country, or other, doesn’t use it for political advantage.
Run it from pole to pole and in water deep enough so’s China won’t build an island on it.
Think of all the jobs that could be created by doing things like re-mastering all the DVD’s for car navigation systems alone! We would have boater charts, a mad rush to hire cartographers to put “the new” numbers of maps, and the same for aircraft. It would be an economic bonanza.
As logical as it is to stick to one time – I’m an adherent of a global time too – we are no doubt going to do the same silliness next spring. And that will screw me up again.
I’m not an absolutist on this: If we are really commemorating time with a prime meridian, then let’s move it to Washington and run the prime meridian through the Pentagon because the U.S. Department of Defense developed GPS and the related ultra-accurate timekeeping that system required.
Or, through the an average of the home towns of these guys:
U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) developed the system, which originally used 24 satellites. It became fully operational in 1995. Bradford Parkinson, Roger L. Easton, and Ivan A. Getting are credited with inventing it.
Parkinson’s home town was Madison, Wisconsin. Easton was from Craftsbury, Vermont, while Ivan Getting hailed from NYC. A prime meridian through Wall St. would be an easy sell, wouldn’t it|?
As long as we’re at it, can we please get rid of magnetic north? Obsolete thinking. No longer relevant. Same the money spent renumbering runways, while you’re at it.
Thus, in closing, I propose to you that daylight time is just another example of American gullibility. Acceptance of daylight time seems to parallel the introduction of fluoride into water supplies, but that could just be my odd way of thinking about things.
Fact: We make up time – over-emphasize its importance – and then wonder how we all end up living in a nation of stressed-out, time-savaged, elevated blood pressure self medicated delusionists.
It’s OK to go in to work a little later or leave earlier if the traffic is bad or you just feel like lighting off the BBQ or playing with the kids. As long as you get the job done for which you’ve been hired, can we ditch the power-tripping and micro management minutia? If the work is done, screw it: Go play.
Oh, no. Not here. We’re a nation of really stupid clock-suckers
Is It Time Yeti?
Remember the Yeti – a/k/a/ abominable snowman?
Here’s a really interesting report from the BBC suggesting (if my time-addled brain is still functional) that the reason we have not had a lot of reports of the abominable snowman (Yeti)_ of late is that people in that part of the world are not going to the mountains as much anymore.
Until a cellular carrier finds a big enough market of ‘em.
Point is here’s a great story to unfold in a novel. Imagine for a moment that the world government (e.g. U.N.) has actually been handed an ultimatum from a consortium of Yeti’s, snowmen, and Skin-Walkers.
For an even better novel, toss in some of the breakaway Nazi survivors who took subs out of Europe at the end of WW II.
What if that – not environmental largess – is what’s behind all this Agenda 21 and closing down public lands to the public that’s going on? A negotiated peace. Hmmm…
Get writing…
I’m off to battle the Circads. They seem to fear coffee.
Write when you break-even,
George george@ure.net
Well, have you considered that if you move the ‘historical prime meridian’ that you will then have to move the international date line in the Pacific? This is of more importance than the ‘agreed to’ convention in England. (Modern scientists have tied the passage of time to the motions of certain atoms, so this is as modern as possible.)
And while GPS has come into fashion – knowledge of the deviation of magnetic north is still an important consideration for many groups of people.
In this more ‘modern’ society, daylight savings time is becoming less useful, and I agree that remaining on a standard time year round would be great. (Good luck on getting people to agree!)
George,
I call it “True Up Day”, because all of the time devices that I didn’t reset last Spring suddenly are correct.
For your consideration, see http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/11/daylight-saving-time-is-terrible-heres-a-simple-plan-to-fix-it/281075/
FYI, the international dateline is already out in the Pacific Ocean. I think you need to go back to bed or double-up on the java.
I’m all for abolishing DST or doing just the opposite (fall forward / spring back). I would rather have more daylight in the afternoon in the winter months.
Daylight savings from an American Indian point of view;
” Only the white man thinks that by cutting a foot off of the top of the blanket and adding it to the bottom of the blanket, makes a longer blanket”.
Time as we know it is a useful construct, but adding unnecessary complexity to anything is generally not good.
We need to eliminate the time changes, and personally I’d standardize on the “daylight savings” paradigm. I’d rather get up before first light and be able to see later in the day. For those of us who do a lot of outside work, it’s the only sane pattern. Those who work during the day would certainly appreciate light after work, rather than driving both ways in the dark.
Whatever we do, let’s just call it “time”, rather than adding “standard” or “daylight savings”. We’re still calling our gasoline “unleaded”, even though car gas stopped having lead in it in the ’70’s!
WHY End Day Light Saving Time ?
illuminated site of the week
Why did daylight saving time (DST) start, and why does it still continue? When asking a random sample of people we heard two answers again and again: “To help the farmers” or “Because of World War I … or was it World War II?”In fact, farmers generally oppose daylight saving time. In Indiana, where part of the state observes DST and part does not, farmers have opposed a move to DST. Farmers, who must wake with the sun no matter what time their clock says, are greatly inconvenienced by having to change their schedule in order to sell their crops to people who observe daylight saving time
The real prime meridian runs through the great pyramid in Egypt. When moved, att the key lines and power spots align perfectly in a complex grid. Bruce Cathy discovered this years ago, and I believed developed and sold software for personal use, because he simply did not have the time or interest to calculate all of them. As a commercial pilot in for a New Zealand airline, he noticed that ufo sightings reported in the area were following a pattern. He also calculated that nuclear weapons will only detonate at certain times and at certain points on the earth. This was triggered when he noticed an illogical delay of 45 minutes in dropping one of the nukes on Japan.
Changing the prime meridian or the time zones is only a matter of changing computer programs, as it would be a consistent delta across the board, no more difficult than changing civilian to military time in your head, or seeing GMT on a web page and mentally converting to local time.
And George, get some melatonin for when you change time zones. Take it, and 30 minutes later, go to bed. Coffee is your worst enemy when changing time zones. I also recommend sleep music by Dr Jeffery Thompson. He has one cd so effective that it causes me to start dreaming before I go to sleep.
Hold up there Bruce.
I happen to have read the source book for that “nukes won’t go off everywhere” It was from a novel early 1970 or so called “The Jesus Factor”. Wiki it and you will find:
“The Jesus Factor is a 1970 conspiracy theory thriller novel by Edwin Corley based on the Manhattan Project of World War II and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It concerns issues relating to the “arms race” and the collective guilt of those involved with the bombings.[1]
Its fictional premise is the discovery during the development of nuclear weapons that they only detonate if stationary in a gravitational field, making their use as air-dropped bombs impossible. In the novel, the nuclear attacks of World War II are simulated using aeroplane-mounted magnesium flares and dispersed radionuclides, taking advantage of the destruction caused by an earthquake. An international conspiracy hides this fact in the interest of maintaining nuclear deterrence.
The story concerns events when this status quo is threatened by one of the original bombardiers, who discovers the conspiracy while running for US president with a policy of nuclear disarmament.
“
Yes, and all this happens on the Flat Earth when Niribubble and planet x are rising .
The flat earth stops a lot of stuff , including nuclear bombs, aliens from another planet and the human brain from functioning on anything but a brain damaged reptilian mode.
Nice comment about “Aridzona” but did you not know that they do not change the time there? They use standard time — all the time — no changing for the bar B Q’s ! Sure is fun to chase around all the idiocies of mankind, isn’t it? LOL
I half remember it from time to time. The Elaine walks me through the reminder and the explanation and I sit around asking her every time we talk to one of her kids out there “What time is it out there?” Just so we can be sure.
I’m still not sure how that works, but as a conspiracy buff, how about this for a theory:
The earthquake swarm is Arizona was caused by time friction as the rest of the country changed time settings and Arizona did not. Howszatt grab yah?
YETI, big foot or Sasquatch – same dif
You’ve not been reading Mary Joyce’s work.
She is the go to gal in her mountainous area…
Radio people often interview her too, even CTC
She posted all kinds of big foot stories as well as little people.
Seek specific titles of her postings –
http://skyshipsovercashiers.com/bigfootet
“Messing about with clocks” is perpetrated by the same people who “mess about with calendars”
If you observe the New Moon (old Jewish method), you start counting the days of the month. None of this 28-29-30-31 day stuff to memorize! Every few years add another lunar (leap) month to keep the Spring Festivals in synch with the sun.
How hard it that? Any rural bloke can do it.
Same for the sun’s march across the sky. Yes, there is more daytime in summer, and more nighttime in winter. And yes, it gets colder in winter, although the mainstream news people seem to be shocked by seasonal changes in weather every year.
F
I think it was Sitting Bull or maybe another First American who said, “Only the white man can cut a foot off a blanket, sew it on the other end and believe that it is now longer.”
I usually protest the time change twice a year. I leave an hour early in the spring and go in an hour late in the fall.