On This Day in History: April 30
Daylight saving time
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Fuck daylight saving time. Fuck it in every hole. With a cactus. Actually, wait. Fuck standard time. Let’s stick with daylight. I’m at the 51st parallel and don’t want the goddamn sun coming up at 4 a.m. in June. Just fucking pick one and stick with it, okay?
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: April 30, 1916--
It’s probably apocryphal, but the story goes that a Native American was told about the reason behind daylight saving time and he replied, “Only a white man would believe that you could cut a foot off the top of a blanket, sew it to the bottom, and have a longer blanket.” Whether this was said or not, that is one true fucking statement.
Hey, George Hudson. I know you’re dead, but fuck you. You should have stuck to your fucking bugs and not fucked with time. British-born New Zealander Hudson was an amateur entomologist who did shiftwork, and he wanted more daylight to look for bugs, so in 1895 he said hey everyone, let’s fuck with the clocks so I can see better to dig up fucking ants and centipedes and shit because it’s all about me. Asshole.
A couple of Canadian cities began toying with daylight saving time as early as 1908, because Canadians can be assholes too, but it wasn’t used at the national level until April 30, 1916, when the Germans and Austrians were in the middle of a giant fucking war they started. They said hey let’s be even bigger assholes on the international stage and implement Hudson’s dumb-as-fuck idea because maybe it would help save coal during a time of war. A bunch of other European countries soon followed and here we fucking are.
It wasn’t created for farmers. That’s a myth. Farmers fucking hate it. Listen to the farmers.
Not everyone believes daylight saving time to be dumb as fuck. Those people are dumb as fuck. In my opinion, defending changing clocks twice a year is fucking dumb and we need to stop doing it. There are arguments both for and against, linking it to shit like heart attacks and car crashes and unproven energy savings and decreased efficiency and computer glitches and won’t someone think of the poor little children walking to school in the dark?
There is no convincing evidence that changing clocks is a good thing. Likewise, proponents of saying “Ah fuck the clock is wrong” and fiddling with buttons to change it while you’re driving your Honda Civic to work and you’re tired as fuck because it’s too goddamn early on a springtime Monday and you’re not paying attention to the road so you blow through a stop sign and take out an old lady and her little Bichon Frise too . . . uh . . . those people say the criticisms are overstated.
Holy run-on sentence. Where was I? Oh, yeah. Since the pros and cons are so very fucking debatable then maybe we should just err on the side of not fucking with time.
The book is now available! Get On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down.
YES. Let's stay on DST forever. I say this autumn we refuse to fall back. We just don't do it. Enough of us say no and we become the standard. Who's with me?
Apocryphal or not, that statement actually kinda ridiculous. If you’re in bed and you’re too hot or too cold, you don’t cut part of the blanket off, you move the blanket on your body. It isn’t about the length of the blanket. And changing the clocks arbitrarily, especially in different ways in different parts of the world (or country or state in some cases) is fucking stupid and we shouldn’t do it anymore.