$&%# William Willett

Okay, this may seem a little harsh, but once again I'm suffering under the effects of the accursed Daylight Saving Time. Twice a year, we change what time it is in an effort to save on ye olde power bill. I spend months getting myself and, more importantly, my kids on a regular sleep schedule (I've given up on Management entirely), only to be undone in the name of saving on candles. Enter insult to injury; apparently it doesn't even work.

So, the theory is that we move the clocks around in summer so we get another hour of daylight in the afternoon, and an hour less of daylight in the morning. This is helpful, because all that daylight was really interfering with me trying to wake up in the morning, whereas the still-shining sun at night makes it so much easier to convince the kids that it's time for bed. One of my few childhood memories that don't involve hurting myself is lying in bed, looking out a window on a brightly lit yard. I don't recall my exact thoughts, but I'm pretty sure they were the childhood equivalent of "this is total bull&%$*".

Now, I will pause a moment to point out a bit of historical misconception here. Originally, I was going to title this "*%&$ Ben Franklin", but a bit of research (yes, I actually care enough to research this stuff before writing about it) proved that he was not as responsible for this temporal travesty as many would lead us to believe. Franklin actually did propose something like DST while he was in France, but it was a satire, not an actual suggestion. Since society at the time did not watch clocks the way they do now, it wasn't that big a deal.

No, the man to blame here is one William Willett. And do you know why he suggested it? Was it to save money on power, or increase productivity? No, it was because he felt people were sleeping in too late, and worse, he didn't like cutting his golf game short. That's right, our sleep schedules are now screwed up because some early rising, busybody, golf-loving freak decided that people were missing out on the morning. As a fairly early rising person myself, I can say with a certain authority that he should have minded his own damned business.

You know something else? William Willett is the great-great-grandfather of Chris Martin, husband of Gwyneth Paltrow and front man for the band Coldplay. I don't know what that has to do with anything, but now I won't be able to hear that Yellow song without thinking to myself "&$#% William Willett". So now he's screwed that up for me too.

So there you go - I'm not a big fan of Daylight Saving Time, and I'm not a big fan of William Willet. As far as I'm concerned, DST just leads to being tired and listening to boring stories about people thinking that they would get out of school soon only to realize that the clocks were wrong and they had another hour to go. (Just kidding there, Cadet. As Fun Size pointed out at the time, it was a good story, and you should tell it more often.)