Suck an Egg, It's Daylight Saving Time

Hello readers, we're going to take a little break from the Fad Wagon this week while I write more of that book to excerpt and you learn a thing or two about daylight-saving time. Sound fun? Tough.

Many common misconceptions survive regarding daylight-saving time, including the belief that we do it for a reason. Nothing could be further from the truth. And don't call it "Daylight-Savings Time," that just proves you're a part of the International Communist Conspiracy.

The idea was originally suggested by Benjamin Franklin, compulsive liar and great American. Franklin was always late to everything, and frequently explained away his lack of punctuality by bragging that he lived in a special personal time zone that everybody else was too stupid to understand. When questioned, he'd rattle off a bunch of bullshit figures about how he saved energy by living his life an hour later than everybody else, allowing him to sleep in, stay up later and avoid traffic by traveling while everybody else had already arrived at wherever they were going. Only his girlfriend believed this, and everyone else came to refer to any ridiculously late events as occurring in "Franklin Time." Whenever anybody needed him there for a meeting they'd tell him it started two hours before it actually did, and then laugh when they got there and he'd been sitting and waiting for an hour.

Franklin's various shenanigans and rocky relationship with the truth earned him the nickname "B.S. Franklin," which he told naïve girls was short for "Balls Franklin." He came to fame after publishing an almanac of bullshit weather predictions and claiming to have "discovered" electricity after being blown off his toilet by a bolt of lightning. For years neighbors had warned that the gigantic kite Franklin had attached to his house, in hopes of sailing to a better neighborhood, would get him blown off the toilet in the middle of the night by a gigantic bolt of lighting, but he'd done little to heed their warnings. A smug Franklin discovered fire later that week when his neighbors burnt his house to the ground, taking offense at the "Father of Electricity" banner he'd begun carrying around town.

In 1776 Franklin was late for a meeting of the Second Continental Congress, and just missed the vote to kick Benjamin Franklin out of the Second Continental Congress. Upset that he missed his opportunity to cast the lone dissenting vote, Franklin demanded that the colony of Pennsylvania adopt "Daylight-Saving Time," a new system of his extremely recent invention that would have made him, in fact, early for the meeting. Thomas Jefferson signed the motion into law as a joke to humor Franklin, signing the form "Upyour Penis," but in a tremendous gaffe the clerk failed to examine the signature and "Daylight-Saving Time" was passed as Pennsylvania colonial law.

Relations between the various colonies were highly bitchy at this point in history, and I mean like drag queens at an Easter buffet. The new time change law really chapped the asses of the neighboring colonies, and before long, each one had passed their own new laws, not about to give smug Pennsylvania the satisfaction of always being early to everything and looking down its nose at all the other colonies as slacking layabouts.

After the Revolutionary War this really got out of hand, with states changing their time zones on an almost weekly basis in an attempt to one-up neighboring states and psych out tourists. At one point when you traveled from Massachusetts to Connecticut, you actually went back in time two days and had to be careful not to step on any butterflies or do anything that might mess things up for your future self back in Massachusetts. Eventually the federal government stepped in and announced that everybody had to get with the same program and stop all the silly horseshit, and from then on there'd only be two wacky nonsensical time changes per calendar year.

States were grumpy about losing their individuality, for sure, but most complied. I say most because Arizona and Hawaii never actually adopted daylight-saving time after becoming states, they only pretended to whenever the feds were around. To this day whenever some government official steps into a bank in Arizona you'll see employees scrambling to set the clocks back and act like they've been saving daylight all along.

The other exception is the state of Indiana, which never got its shit together and still has different time zones for every neighborhood, but after over 200 years of trying the government has given up on that state as a lost cause. Federal employees often refer to any broken or inexplicably errant clocks as being set to "Indiana Time," a joke that's very popular among the employees who aren't from Indiana.

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