Daylight Savings

It's official. I have survived yet another transition to Daylight Savings Time. It's odd: I travel a lot for work, including lots of trans-Atlantic flights as well as red-eyes from the West Coast, so I'm no stranger to jet lag. And yet I swear the little one-hour spring forward messed me up just as severely. I walked around like a dopey zombie for three days, and I'm just now back to the point where I don't feel exhausted when I wake up each morning.

Neither The Wife nor I have much truck with the whole Daylight Savings thing, since we don't see much real benefit to it beyond screwing up everyone's internal clock. According to Wikipedia, the whole concept of Daylight Savings Time was the brainchild of builder, outdoorman, and general busybody William Willet when he "observed with dismay how many Londoners slept through the best part of a summer day." It figures such a loopy notion would be conceived out of contempt for others. Wikipedia does a nice job of limning DST's clear-cut pros (increased time for evening leisure activities) and clear-cut cons (missed appointments) and the many things that may be pros or may be cons but we just don't know (increased or decrease traffic fatalities? economic impacts? energy savings?).

Here's another to add to the list, thanks to an NPR interview via Fanatic Cook: Daylight Savings screws up dairy cows and milk production. Though it's not clear who's to blame here, society at large or inflexible farmers . . .