Greetings Thought for the Weekend readers!
In anticipation of the upcoming weekend, I felt it my civic duty to remind you of one of the most exciting events of each year, happening this Sunday. With the help of Cher, I bring you this very important Public Service Announcement:
This Sunday, we get to ‘fall back’ into our beds for an extra hour of sleep! (I told you it was exciting….)
If you can’t sleep in, you can spend your hour in other ways. Polls indicate that other than sleeping, the most popular ways to use an extra hour are: relaxing, spending time with family/friends, cooking, and exercising. Less popular ways to use an extra hour include:doing housework, completing home repairs, catching up on email/office work, and having sex. Wow! Making whoopee rates with the same percentages as housework and office work? I wonder who they polled!
We’ve been observing Daylight Savings Time in the United States for nearly one hundred years now. The practice made a lot more sense before electricity became mainstream. It was believed that adding an hour of sunlight to the day promoted higher productivity. Today, the debate rages. Is Daylight Savings Time archaic? Should it be abolished?
Those who want to get rid of the practice argue that it doesn’t really save energy, it disturbs sleep patterns and it poses challenges in time keeping. Some of us have digital clocks in our cars or on our ovens that are an hour off for at least half of the year – come on, I know you’re out there!
Those in favor of DST, say that this practice still has benefits: it maximizes natural daylight, saves on electricity, and helps decrease road accidents.
As for me, I’m all for Daylight Savings Time come Fall when we “gain” an extra hour, but it’s not so fun when the clocks “Spring Forward”. What do you think? Do you like or loathe DST? Do you think we’ll ever abandon the tradition?
For the time being, I guess it’s fitting that Cher has become the unofficial spokewoman for the November’s Daylight Savings event. Just like DST, Cher’s a survivor -she keeps coming back again and again and again. As Comedian Jimmy James once quipped: “After a nuclear holocaust, all that will be left are cockroaches and Cher.”
Make every hour count this weekend,
~Bob
