Well, NASCAR has come and gone from the Metroplex, leaving behind a massive trail of empty Milwaukee’s Best beer cans, Slim Jim wrappers and pregnant cousins. So what is the next big item on the agenda? The Masters? The Final Four? The Rangers’ home opener? Peter Arnett live with Barbara Walters? I don’t think so. It’s Daylight Savings Time! This Saturday, according to the trick we all learned to remember, we will “Spring” forward. The weathermen will remind us. Who put them in charge of it.

There is the usual “first and last” significance, like it is the last time Sadaam Hussein will likely be springing forward, or the first time Elizabeth Smart has sprung forward since her return. When we spring forward, we actually lose an hour, so poor Elizabeth, lost 9 months of her life through kidnap and now she loses another hour Saturday. When will her losses stop?

I love the extra hour of daylight. 60 more minutes of outside chores my wife can throw at me each night. “It’s too dark to mow the yard” just got invalidated. Funny how we all think we have gained an hour of daylight. Like the Sun just changed it’s path so it spends 60 minutes more to cross the sky. I guess to balance that, on the other side of the Earth, in Korea, the Sun must be going down an hour earlier to balance. That gives them less daylight to test their new nuclear toys so Daylight Savings Time is helping our security. Heck, we should Spring forward 12 hours and eliminate all their testing time and bring about World Peace.

Since we have one hour less Sun in the morning, it washes out to zero. Don’t worry, our night time air strikes in Iraq didn’t just get cut an hour, they just get an extra hour in the morning, which means when our pilots are finished, they are that much closer to the 10:30 lunch menu kicking in at McDonalds.

We spring forward at 1:00 a.m. Saturday (technically Sunday) and it instantly becomes 2:00 a.m. So what happened to that hour? Is it like Back to the Future? What if I scheduled a 1:30 flight that night? The one o’clock hour just doesn’t exist. I learned that the hard way in college. This cruel, but great looking girl promised to have sex with me at 1:30 a.m. on Daylight Savings Day. She knew 1:30 a.m. would never happen, we would “spring” past it, at 1:00 a.m. meaning the clock would never strike 1:30. That was a very mean, cruel, trick she played on me, but she didn’t think out every angle, because put her in my car and drove to Arizona where they don’t recognize Daylight Savings Time.

Maybe guys should get frisky with their wives right as the time change occurs. Gives us a chance to say we can perform for an hour and three minutes. Or kids can jump in the pool and go underwater so they can say they held their breath for over an hour. I plan on finding a Lenscrafters that is still open, take in my lens prescription and show up a minute later wondering where the hell my glasses are.
 

Previous installments of Fun with Doug, people!:

March 3, 2003
December 16, 2002
December 9, 2002
October 28, 2002
October 21, 2002
October 7, 2002

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