Daylight-saving time commences
this weekend, with
the usual encouragements
to make sure that when you move
your clocks ahead an hour _ the
change actually happens at 2 a.m.
Sunday _ you also change the batteries
in your smoke detectors.
This is good advice, in that while
more than 90 percent of homes in
the United States have smoke detectors,
a third of them are thought
to have dead or missing batteries.
But daylight-saving time _ which
begins in most of the country on
the second Sunday in March and
lasts until the first Sunday in
November _ can be pretty interesting.
We learned, for instance, that a
man who had been born just after
midnight during daylight-saving
time had a Vietnam-era draft
number based on his birth date
that would have sent him into the
service.
But he successfully argued that
since he was born in Delaware,
and that state used standard time
instead of daylight-saving time to
officially record births, his birthday
was actually the previous day.
That day, according to the webexhibits.
org website, allowed him to
avoid getting drafted.
Again, according to the website,
in September 1999, three Palestinian
terrorists planting bombs
designed to blow up two buses
carrying passengers in Israel were
themselves killed because their
bombs went off an hour early owing
to Israel having just switched
back to standard time.
U.S. Law Enforcement Assistance
Administration statistics
show violent crime is down 10 percent
to 13 percent during daylightsaving
time.
The U.S. Department of Transportation
says daylight-saving time
cuts the country’s electricity usage
by about 1 percent a day.
Daylight-saving time does cause
an occasional problem. In many
states, bars that stay open after 2
a.m. lose an hour of drinking time
when daylight-saving time begins.
That has led to disturbances in
several cities, none worse that
those in 1997 and 1998 at Ohio University
in Athens.
More than 1,000 students were
not happy about the bars closing,
rioted and threw liquor bottles at
the police, leading to 47 arrests in
’97 alone.
The time change is also troublesome
for Amtrak, which has a
policy stating that its trains cannot
leave a station before their scheduled
time. So, when standard time
kicks in, trains will stop in towns
at 2 a.m. and have to wait an hour
before getting going again. In the
spring, all of the Amtrak trains
automatically are an hour behind
schedule at 2 a.m.
So, there’s a lot more to the
whole process than just “spring
ahead, fall back.” By the way, the
first day of spring is next Saturday.
Enjoy the extra hour in the evening.
