Weirdnesses.

[captainsblog]

* The clock.

As it happened, I was awake Sunday morning at 1:59 AM. A minute later, I took a screenshot as I began the third hour of my 25 hour day.


 

“You get an extra hour of sleep!“, they say. They are lying, at least if you live with animals. Yesterday the shenanigans started about four hours after that  2 AM  1 AM screenshot, and continued until the newly defined 7 AM. I resisted as long as I could, putting a white-noise video on my phone under my pillow to drown out the sound. You can’t drown out the jumping on the bed and the licking of the ear, though. Twelve hours later, I just left the house, taking care of feeding a friend’s kitties, and this morning we were all more or less back on a normal annoyance schedule.

I don’t know why we have to go through this bullshit twice a year. The Senate, which usually can’t get 60 votes to agree on anything, actually passed a bill to make Daylight Savings Time year-round, but it can’t get 218 votes in the House for some bizarre reason. I’m sure some of that is the MAGA crowd that won’t vote for anything Nancy puts in front of them, but I suspect some of the rest of it comes from the farm lobby.

My work study job in law school included filing U.S. government documents.  These included congressional committee reports on pending legislation, and even back then people were sick of this time change nonsense, so bills were on the table to make DST permanent. There were pages and pages of opposition from Iowa, about how unfair it would be to farmers who would have to drive to their barn dances in the dark. Apparently nobody told Farmer John that he could just start his fucking barn dance an hour earlier. Maybe now Nancy can get the bill passed in the lame duck session, assuming she hasn’t been beaten to death with hammers before that.

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* The calendar.

It should not be windows-open weather in Buffalo the week of my birthday. Yet here we are. They haven't even dropped the snowplow stakes onto our driveway yet, because why would they?  It's often a goal of ours to have my birthday dinner outside in our greenhouse.  At this rate, we might be able to have it completely outside if we start early enough in the afternoon:



I decided to give in to what All the Kool Kids Are Doing this year and started a Facebook fundraiser for my birthday.  You can see and donate to it ifn you like by clickying this. That public post has a generic description of the fundraiser, but the one wot I wrote is: 

For my birthday, I am asking you to support The Brigid Alliance, which helps book, coordinate and pay for travel, travel expenses, and child care, serving as a single, trusted point of contact for every step of the journey in support of womens' reproductive rights.

Don't think this is a Red State Only issue. Hospitals, pharmacies and medical practices in New York are already denying care or medication to women who are or even could become pregnant, out of fear of future bans and snitch laws. The crazies are saying the quiet parts out loud now. Stop the madness by voting against them on the 8th, but donate on the 9th because the Republic of Gilead will never give up.

I discovered that organization through singer Phoebe Bridgers. On a few occasions, she's opened a 24-hour window for free downloads-for-a-donation of her cover with Maggie Rogers of the Goo Goo Doll classic "Iris." I missed it this time, but saw her cause this time round was Brigid Alliance, so I'm doing my part to boost the much needed signal.

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Back to news of the Weird:

* The sportsball.

The Phils are done, and with them baseball season. The Bills headed down to where Jimmy Hoffa is and experienced similar results, losing on the road to a Jets team they were expected to beat handily.  Lots of explanations/excuses, including the loss of a significant portion of their defensive corps, but this team always seems to hit a lull right around the midseason point; a year ago today was their inexplicable loss to the Hapless Jaguars at home last year.  Those kinds of losses won't keep them out of the playoffs, but they might keep them from playing at home in January, where they usually do much better.

The prediction on SNL the night before about BillsMafia proved sadly appropriate:
 

Watch on YouTube

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* And of course, there'll be Weird Al.

Last night, we finished watching the movie with Daniel Radcliffe in the starring role. Weird Al himself appears in a brief opening scene promising that it's all 100% completely true, and then surfaces in an extended cameo role later- as do many from the film, television and entertainment bizzes.  Don't believe the "true" bit for a second, though; it may be hard to identify much that is 100% correct in every detail.  But it's all so over the top, and played with such genuine fun and affection, that it works. Even with the commercial breaks on Roku, the streaming service that's using it as a springboard to get you watching it. Most if not all of the commercials were for Roku itself, which is a streaming device, a streamable content channel, a floor wax AND a dessert topping.



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Speaking of things not necessarily being entirely 100 percent true no matter what the song says: I have been asked to correct the historical record about a certain would-be politician from the Land of Oz New Jersey.  My sister did not deal with that future quack at any hospital in Pennsylvania. Why would I have thought he had anything to do with that Commonwealth?  No, it was back when a medical company Donna worked for had a client in Orange County, New York- up the Hudson from NYC. He was called in when he was at Columbia Presbyterian to consult on a very difficult case, and at least then, he did a great job.

Like a Surgeon.

 

Comments

[weofodthignen]

The "DST all year" proposition passed here in California a few years ago, then appears to have sunk without trace; your mention of national shenanigans goes some way to explaining that, though I still suspect the state just has other things preoccupying it. In the aftermath of the vote it emerged that many people voted for it as the best of a bad job and even those who proposed it admitted it would have been better to make it for abolition of DST, but they figured the school sports lobby would doom that. I'm afraid I have a strong opinion on this.

Farmers have a point—as your animals just demonstrated. The actual time of day doesn't change, DST forces people who operate on the basis of when it's daylight to muck about fitting their appointments with offices and their TV watching around the fixed constraints of their job. The argument that it saves power is obvious garbage; the lights just get used at the other end of the day. The primary argument, since the wartime one for maximization of labor became obsolete, has always been that we should inconvenience everyone—and risk children's lives on dark streets going to school in the morning—so that those kids whose parents view school as a vehicle for sports have one more hour when they don't need lights on the field. It would save far more energy, and possibly lead to some of those kids learning more in their school years (I don't think all of them are voluntary sports majors in high school or before) if we instead restricted school sport to weekends and, for practice, to the hours between school letting out and 5 pm, so the kids' onsite workday was only an hour longer than an adult workday instead of the Olympic-style training hours high school athletes currently put in. And reinstated natural time, which most people have never experienced year-round because of this stupidity.

I lived through an experiment in year-round DST in the UK: the time was relabeled British Standard Time from British Summer Time, and Wikipedia tells me it was in force from October 1968 to October 1971. They're more sanguine about the public response than I remember from the time; I remember people really didn't like the dark, cold mornings and were horrified by the increase in road deaths. My one good memory from that winter is when the Underground train I took every morning to school climbed onto the elevated track near Turnham Green station and the dawn sky was apple green, with the thick trackside wiring on its short scaffold outlined against it. I was in a half-waking state and cold, and it was a moment of poetry. But the experiment was judged a failure and abandoned, and I remember us all being very glad of it.

[sturgeonslawyer]

The "DST All Year" proposition didn't mandate it; it gave the Legislature permission to petition Congress to let us join Arizona and Hawai'i, which are currently the only states that don't use DST.

[captainsblog]

I remember the one year the US briefly switched back to wintertime DST after the (then earlier) "fall back" to standard. I'm guessing December 1973, at the height of the first oil shock. I awoke to my then-reliable WNBC alarm clock wakeup of Imus in the Morning back when he was funny, and his then and longtime newsman Charles McCord announced, "It's 53 degrees and DARK in New York." A year later, we re-standardized in the fall.

[sturgeonslawyer]

Yes, the Phillies pholded after a great start; but they did contribute to a genuine unique event: Philadelphia is the only (at least US, not sure about the world) city to lose two major sportsball championships in five hours.

Oh, and a slightly early Happy Birthday.

[captainsblog]

Thank you.

And despite there being no MLS teams for hundreds of miles (other than Toronto FC's pitch aboot 100 KM and a border away), we knew about the Philly connection to its Cup final. The brother of the coach of the Bills is the President of Philadelphia Union, and our McDermott wore their McDermott's hoodie to a presser on last week's Media Day, likely incurring a fine from the No Fun League.