Also relevant: the temperature today is supposed to be 78 degrees. That'll boost anyone's mood.
And knowing it's only 3 days until the weekend! Woo!
I have more energy and motivation and feel more cheerful
I thought Lizard's last post was supposed to take care of this problem.
Rah and I ate dinner outside at a downtown plaza last night around 7pm with just a little sunset starting up and a faint pink trim to the clouds and I had a definite "DST! Fuck yeah!" kind of moment.
Give me my hour back,
Give me my hour back,
You [Congress].
I want my hour back.
Sounds like someone didn't have to get up before 7 am today - felt like midwinter.
Until I went out in short sleeves, anyway.
My almost-3 year old denied that we were eating dinner Monday night, since it wasn't dark outside.
Do y'all realize we're down to 4 1/2 months of actual solar time per year? Weird.
I'm glad it's working out for y'all, but all I am is exhausted since the change.
I wish we could go to DOUBLE DST in mid-summer. All that light being wasted on the early morning. It is tragic.
I am going to Sweden in May, so I'll get to experieince light that is more on my (night-owl) schedule.
I'm for daylight-savings time all year, and maybe doubling up during the summer. Standard time only helps extreme morning people.
My schedule is flexible enough that I could have been coming and going an hour earlier all along. But I couldn't have imposed it on my family, and we end the week sleep-deprived as it is. Too much to do and my son won't go to bed until he's killed them all, but of course they keep coming. I hear him, oblivious in his headset, shouting "Cover me!" and "Look out!" in the night.
I'm with apo. I've been really groggy since the change, and so have my kids. It's pitch black when we get up at 6:30, and it's still dusky when they head to school, which is dangerous to boot. The local superintendent sent out a plea to drivers because they're worried about elementary school kids heading to the school in the dark. Bush seems to be adopting all of Nixon's stupidest ideas. I guess price freezes are next.
The change makes me groggy, too, which is why we should keep DST year 'round. As for kids going to school in the dark, I've never understood why school starts so early in the day.
School does start way too early in the day, especially high school.
Why do we ever spring forward? We should just keep falling back until we loop around again.
Guys, I fucking know these people.
Couldn't we just leave the clocks on the same time all year, and adjust our schedules to the daylight or not?
Guys, I fucking know these people.
Really?
Yes, let's smash the clocks in with our phones, destroying both, and sit in silent darkness for eternity.
Yep. They're musical theater kids about to graduate from a school in the midwest that I have a lot of association with.
Guys, I fucking know these people
I try not to think about them.
19: OK, yeah, it kinda does.
Guys, I fucking know these people
Then you can finally answer the question: hot chicks with douchebag, or generally douchey people, or unfairly maligned youngsters?
The WaPo ran a long letter Saturday (not with the crank letters either) that takes LB's idea in 15 and goes one step beyond.
Everyone in the world should just set the clocks to GMT. The writer admits It would be confusing at first. But he thinks we'd adapt quickly to this logical system.
18: That's cool, Joe. I had a sorta similar experience a couple of years ago, when random internet porn turned up somebody I knew from college.
23: I'd almost sign onto that, if it weren't for changing the date in the middle of the workday. Everything else about it works for me.
24: They made a movie about that porn you were searching for.
26: Oh believe me, I know about Zoo. That wasn't what I was looking for, though my acquaintance was posing on and around a tractor.
23: Yes, GMT all the way. Since the change I've been waking up at 4am. Set the damned thing and leave it alone!
hot chicks with douchebag, or generally douchey people, or unfairly maligned youngsters
The ones I really know are the guy and the non-topless girl. And they're nice people, if a little self-obsessed. But I shouldn't throw stones in that regard.
random internet porn turned up somebody I knew from college
Really?? That would totally freak me out.
It would freak me out, and I would have to watch it immediately, of course.
Not if you already knew him as "the horse sex guy from college".
I would have to watch it immediately
They were still photos, and just of her.
So, what you're saying is essentially that na na nananana, your angel is a centerfold?
Everyone in the world should just set the clocks to GMT. The writer admits It would be confusing at first. But he thinks we'd adapt quickly to this logical system.
I'll do him one better. We should all, worldwide, set our clocks to the same 25 hour day. Everybody gets an extra hour with which to fuck around, and night owls and day freaks are equally happy and miserable over the course of a 25 day cycle.
It's genius, I tell you, genius.
And they're nice people, if a little self-obsessed. But I shouldn't throw stones in that regard.
How can you not love JoeD? Although he managed to miss the one person in that picture most worth knowing, which shows a lack of judgment.
The thing about horses is, they can kill you if they get excited -- basically, you want them to just stand there. Size does matter, fortunately, but you should also avoid the sweet talk, the foreplay, the bedroom eyes, etc., just in case. Ideally you want a frigid horse but that's something that's hard for beginners to to judge.
OT—what wouldn't be at this point—but is there no radio show this week?
34 is awesome -- the only place I ever see the J. Geils Band nowadays is on clearance racks and it's a damn shame I tells ya. Well ok, maybe it is a sign of improvements in the musical tastes of the populace since the '80's, and not at all a shame.
Speaking of clearance racks: behind "Best of J. Geils Band" at Summit Records on Monday, I found "Sonny Boy Williamson: His Best" and it rocks hard. Did you know that the lame classic rock song played by maybe Allman Bros, maybe George Thorogood, maybe... with the chorus line "But there's a man down there, might be your man I don't know" is actually not in fact a lame classic rock song, but an excellent blues song when properly performed?
34 is awesome; I'm laughing even though I've got a headache.
The na-na theme from "Centerfold"; the theme from The Smurfs; the main theme (Peter's) from "Peter and the Wolf".
Just play them in your head (really, it's better if you don't click on the MIDI files), quietly now.
This has pleased me since I was very young.
39: It is the Allman Brothers and I contest any characterization thereof as "lame".
42: Listen to Williamson playing it. The scales will fall from your eyes.
(really, it's better if you don't click on the MIDI files)
Truer words have never been spoke. I tremble to think of what might happen if I clicked on your links.
(Is the title of the Allman Brothers song also "One Way Out"?)
All you people who live in the far south (i.e. the continental US) don't know you're born, re: daylight.
When we were at school in Scotland, in winter, we'd leave for school and it'd be dark (8:30 am) and we'd come home from school (3.45pm) and it'd be dark ...
There is the compensation of being outside playing football at 10pm in the summer, though.
in winter, we'd leave for school and it'd be dark (8:30 am) and we'd come home from school (3.45pm) and it'd be dark ...
This explains the violence, does it? Or is it the heavy drinking that it explains?
ttaM is right, although I'm sure that even happens a bit in the northern border states.
The worst isn't school, at least you can, it's if you leave when it's dark in the morning, go to a windowless office, then leave work in the dark without ever going outside because you are stuck in some death-march project that eats your lunch breaks for weeks.
48: should have been `at least you can see daylight'
I tremble to think of what might happen if I clicked on your links.
Firefox will block five (FIVE!!1!1!) popup windows, that's what.
I remember coming and going in darkness as a kid in Canada. I remember sledding in darkness, and standing off by myself, feeling exhilaratingly alone—although I'm sure someone was keeping an eye on me—watching the other kids sled under the street lamp when I was three years old.
My mother has the reverse story, of watching me happily playing outdoors with the big kids when I was eighteen months or so and we were visiting family in Ireland in the summer, and then being horrified to realize that it was 10pm.
I, on the other hand, have gone from arriving home from work about an hour before dark to arriving at dark. And it's only going to get worse. The spring daylight savings change is so much better than the fall one.
Say, Joe D, did you recently write a TV pilot? An actress whose website I maintain seems to have your name on her news page.
(If this is indiscreet, I trust our overlords will delete this...)
re: 48
The northern states in the US (not including Alaska) are still quite a bit south of most of Scotland. I'm from the central belt in Scotland -- so not the far north -- and that's still a good 10 to 15 degrees north of most of the major US northern cities.
re: 47
The drinking and violence seem to be correlated with the darkness -- see vikings, Finns, etc.
My beautiful wife and I discussed this last night as we enjoyed our evening beverage while the children swam in the pool. It felt like mid summer (temps got up to 85 today). Summer vacation is still months away. I predict schoolwork will suffer.
At 4AM this morning, the Biophysicist and I were awake, discussing how we were now completely out of sync with reality, and how I shouldn't be allowed to fall asleep at 8PM. [I'm assuming that this is because he craved wild sex I've memorised the prime time TV schedule, making me almost as valuable a resource as the intertubes.]
Nothing, I repeat, nothing, should be allowed to start before the sun has risen to, oh, the noon position. If the FSM had meant us to function in the early morning, It wouldn't have invented blackout shades. Clearly, the full-spectrum light bulb is evidence that we were meant to rise late, work briefly, and party all night.
55: The drinking and violence seem to be correlated with the darkness -- see vikings, Finns, etc.
No, we went a-viking because of the damned diet. The drinking was to choke down the lutefisk until we could find something edible.
OT--what wouldn't be at this point--but is there no radio show this week?
The radio show was on Tuesday this week, as every week.
I fight with the handle of my little brown broom
I pull out the wires of the telephone
I hurt in the head and
I hurt in the acting bone
Now I smash up the telly with remains of the broken phone
I fighting for the crust of the little brown loaf
I want it I want it I want it give it to me
(I give it you back when I finish the lunchtea)
I lie in the road try to trip up the passing cars
Yes me and the hedgehog
We bursting the tyres all day
As we roll down the highway towards the setting sun
I reflect on the life of the Highwayman yum yum
Now I smash up the telly and what's left of
The broken phone
Nothing, I repeat, nothing, should be allowed to start before the sun has risen to, oh, the noon position.
Amen, and hallelujah.
Even though it only happens on Sundays, I've many times been inconvenienced by alcohol sales not starting before noon.
Blue laws are teh suck.
Fortunately I'm no longer of an age to be bothered by the booze aisle at the grocery store being closed between midnight and 6 am.
Despite living here all my life, I've never completely gotten the hang of the NYS blue laws, and get burnt occasionally. I'm pretty sure you can't buy liquor or wine at all on Sun, and beer only after noon, which can be a problem if you're having people over for dinner and haven't shopped.
They changed the beer law a few months ago. I think it's 10 AM now.
Fortunately I'm no longer of an age to be bothered by the booze aisle at the grocery store being closed between midnight and 6 am.
Grocery store? Booze aisle? DOES NOT COMPUTE
Every year on Super Bowl Sunday there is nowhere to buy liquor in the state of Pennsylvania after 5 PM. (like every other Sunday) Until about 5 years ago there was nowhere to buy liquor in Pennsylvania at any time on Sundays; now about 1/10 of liquor stores are open for a few hours on Sunday.
ttaM, I think that I would have died living in Scotland--much as I loved visting it midwinter. If I could get up at 9:15 AM and go to sleep at 3:30, I'd be okay. As it is I've only recently managed to find New England winters bearable with the help of a dawn simulator.
I definitely notice that my mood and energy levels are tied to the light and the temperature. In the middle of the summer, I don't get that much sun, because I feel worn our by the heat.
I'm sort of scared to find out what would happen if I spent the summer in Iceland or some other Nordic country with lots of daylight and relatively cool temperatures. I think that the energy would be (ultimately) exhausting.
I'm sort of scared to find out what would happen if I spent the summer in Iceland or some other Nordic country with lots of daylight and relatively cool temperatures.
The one time I spent a summer week in a high latitude, it was very trippy in exactly that way -- the days lasted forever and you never got tired.
In the middle of the summer, I don't get that much sun, because I feel worn our by the heat.
It astounds me that Bostonians haven't figured out that it gets hot in the summer and that they should maybe invest in a little air conditioning. Or is that one of those New England character-building suck-it-up kind of things?
71: And you don't have the coding for craziness in your genes like I do.
There's some family stuff, but nothing that long daylight hours is going to have much of an effect on.
72: We do have air conditioning, although a lot of people don't have it in their homes. There are only a few weeks out of the year that it doesn't cool off at night, so you don't really need central air. A window unit generally suffices.
There's plenty of air conditioning in public places like work---though not in old churches, unlike in D.C. and movie theaters. I've often wondered how winter Oscar movies would fare in the summer. I mean, the studios spend a lot of time trying to figure out what sort of fare will appeal to teenagers, but really people are just going for the air conditioning. I mean, I actually saw Water World with some friends. I would never have agreed to go to see that movie in the winter.
Air conditioning works, of course, but that means that I actually spend a fair amount of time inside on very hot days. Now if it were 70 degrees Fahrenheit all day and sunny, I'd be outside the whole time.
A lot of restaurants I went to when visiting Boston/Cambridge in the summer didn't seem to have AC. There's something particularly unpleasant about the combination of hot rooms and hot food.
Of course, I went 7 years without AC in my cars, in Texas no less, so pot, kettle, etc.
I was mistaken in 68. You can now buy beer starting at 8AM on Sundays in New York State.
In Massachusetts you can buy alcohol after Sundays at noon. I've seen beer and wine bought only, but then I was in a grocery store which wasn't able to sell hard liquor.
You used to have to go to New Hampshire.
78. Fond are my boyhood memories of sneaking across the border to visit the "packie".
Yeah, is there a time limit on this thing?
We don't get BST for another 9 days and I'm already looking forward to it.
Regarding energy and times of day:
About six this morning my daughter arrived to shower while I was still in it myself, so she got in right after me and we talked while I was toweling off. It's her birthday, so I made a joke about "learning the truth at seventeen." That led to a discussion of Janice Ian and derivative emo styles and whatnot, all developing very rapidly, and then it hit me, "She's just like me, she's ready to talk on her highest level as soon as she gets up."
Now my wife is not like that, often even now telling me the it's too early to be talking about something after we've been up for an hour or so. It's as if she has tubes that need to warm up and stabilize. Early in our relationship she regaled her friends with the wonder and terror of my first utterances in the morning (U of C, remember) as if this were somehow freakish.
Many people seem to think this. In a famous passage on writing, Walter Bagehot disparages the industrious habits of Robert Southey, writing his poetry before breakfast, "As if anybody could." Well I could then if I could do it at all.
83: Let's not visit. I can function when I wake up but I don't like to until there's enough caffeine ingested. My father-in-law used to discuss world events first thing in the morning and died of Alzheimers. I figured he over-stressed his neurons by not warming them up first and I'm hoping to avoid that.
I belong to the school which disparages warmups, thinking that driving first thing is no worse anyway. The late Smokey Yunick believed that if you could pressurize your oil before startup there would essentially be no effective wear, and engines would last for millions of miles. I don't know if he ever tried that out.
I'm like Biohazard. I don't mind getting up in the morning, but don't expect me to say anything interesting until I've been awake, fed, and caffeinated for an hour or two.
I cannot think until I've showered, dressed, gotten caffeine and had a smoke. Any attempts at conversation before that are simply interpreted as requests that I administer physical pain.
82: How funny. You're only four hours ahead of the East Coast. Before this year British Summer Time started before DST, so there was a week where the UK was 6 hours ahead.
Do you find you're thinking about different things, and in a different way? It seems as if that'd be a valuable resource, almost like mind-altering drugs. I'm always the same, from first waking, so I just don't know.
I've gotten so accustom to getting up at 5 am that I feel slothful and grosss if I am still in bed at 6:30 am.
I am definitely a coffee-first person. I am pretty much up to speed an hour or so after I am out of bed -- after the second cup of coffee.
The big problem is that I am naturally a late to bed, late to rise person. If I could do whatever I liked I'd be in bed around 3am and get up about 10 and that was always the pattern (more or less) that I settled into given a choice. I love that period between midnight and about 3 -- listening to quiet music and reading a book or playing guitar.
However, I get up before 7am every morning and have done for years even when I didn't have to as I get up and make tea, etc. for my wife who has to be at work early.
This must be doing untold damage to my brain -- early mornings aren't bloody natural.
89: Speaking for myself, no, it's not that I'm thinking, just thinking differently. It's that I'm not thinking. I can get my brain around things like "clean self" and "administer stimulants" and I can append qualifiers like "by any means necessary" but beyond that my thoughts are muddled and thinking is simply very, very hard.
And Rah and I both are like ttaM in terms of the natural clock. Left to my own devices I'd never go to bed before 3 or 4am and I'd never get up before 11. Mornings would exist largely so other people could get the hell out of my way.
92:
"make sure brushing teeth with actual toothpaste not other creams in cabinet."
I never shave first thing in the morning. It'd be a recipe for disaster... I did used to practice (guitar) every morning though, which I could just about manage as it's a fairly mindless physical tax and can be done while medicinal coffee is being drunk.
92: Yeah, same here. It's not a lowered IQ or anything so much as a lack of thought -- I can muddle through a routine just fine, and respond coherently to questions, but the answer to "What are you thinking" is going to be "Nothing at all" until I've been up for a while.
I can get up and pretty much hit the ground running. Not that it's pleasant, but I can make myself do it. My wife? No way. She wakes up in a total fog. Kind of entertaining to watch her wake up if we're out of town. She sits up and looks around a bit with this look of total confusion, clearly not having the slightest idea where she is or how she got there.
94: I've yet to actually realize it too late but I have abruptly realized that the toothbrush halfway to my mouth was covered in product and not toothpaste.
I can get up and pretty much hit the ground running.
Me too, and I'm usually operating on a bare minimum of sleep. I am, however, prone to irritability in the morning.
99: Dude, your gums don't look so good.
101:
Yes, but his teeth have a killer tan.
(be sure to mouse over the pictures if you follow the link in 101)
I meant hair product, but defending the near-prevention of frizzies by application of a light silicon gel to my teeth is even dumber than my usual morning standard.
89: Do you find you're thinking about different things, and in a different way? It seems as if that'd be a valuable resource, almost like mind-altering drugs.
I do. I'm in scan & receive mode right after waking up. Unless I have to act in an emergency, I much prefer to get as fully oriented to the universe as I can before doing anything.
Some of that might be drug-dependent learning. Some of those aforementioned nutty rats were dosed with different drugs and trained on different mazes. After that, they'd run the maze path according to the drug they'd most recently been given. I don't see why differing caffeine and blood-glucose levels wouldn't work the same way.
Some is also just plain hyper-alertness. The older I get the more I realize how much of "me" was formed and is directed by crap that happened when I was 2.5 to 6 YO. Anyway, I think that's why I don't like the extended DST. Dark in the morning means the monsters might still be out there and I can't see them well.
(As for auto warm-ups, I'm easy. I'll start the car before putting on the seat belt, or wiping the back window clear, but that's about it. I'd bet Smokey was right.)
I beleive that this story takes place at the Pacific Union Club, but any old line men's club will do. After his morning workout, the new member, freshly scrubbed, bounds into the dining room where he sees serveral older members, each sitting alone, reading the paper and enjoying their coffee. The new member energetically calls out "Good morning" to each as he passes by. Finally, old Dodsworth, the attendent, catches hold of the new member and informs him "Sir, the speaking breakfast is across the hall". Such are the privaledges of wealth.
Most of my family is like 92. My brother started getting up at 5 AM for work a few years ago, and yet I turn on the radio each morning and don't hear a report about a massacre at his neighborhood Peet's or a road-rage-induced pileup on the freeway to his work. I haven't figured that one out yet.