My favorite day of the year comes a week later in 2007 - yep, you guessed, it's time to "fall back". Early Sunday Morning, November 4, it will be time once again to say goodbye to Daylight Savings Time by setting our clocks back one hour. This is the first year the United States is employing its extended daylight savings hours, and it seems to have been a success thus far - despite the fact that most of the world is sticking to the old shorter daylight savings period, which ended last weekend.
Yes, the U.S. is a time rebel! But at least our familiar Time Zones are still intact. A recent AP article in the Courier News chronicled the plan by Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez to set his nation's clocks back by 30 minutes. Apparently he does not wish to be in the same time zone as the "imperialist powers" in Washington D.C. Venezuelan government officials have been studying this change for eight years, and had planned to make the switch by the end of last month.
The original U.S. time zones were not conceived of or implemented by the U.S. government, but rather by the U.S. and Canadian railway companies. Before their adoption of standard time zones on November 18, 1883, each railroad company kept its own "standard time" - which may or may not have been in sync with any of the "local times" kept by municipalities or counties.
The U.S. Congress didn't get into the act until March 1918, when they passed the Standard Time Act. This law also created Daylight Savings Time, as a way to have more daylight hours in the evening, and created what is arguably every parent's favorite day of the year - the day with the extra hour of sleep!
I'm going to use my extra hour to sleep and dream. Maybe dream of a world where there is no "spring ahead"!
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