Saving daylight... but what about sleep?

It's that time again... last Saturday night we all put our clocks forward 1 hour, and woke up Sunday morning feeling like we'd been hit by a truck.

Why do we persist with this monstrous practice? I actually enjoy waking up to a beautiful warm day. Instead, it's light outside until the late evening, and I find myself going to bed way too late because I haven't realised what time it is!

I decided to find out who thought up this crazy idea. According to Wikipedia, Benjamin Franklin first jokingly suggested it, although not quite: he just said that people should get up and go to bed earlier. The first person to seriously propose it was William Willet in 1907, in his pamphlet "Waste of Daylight". He said this:

'Now, if some of the hours of wasted sunlight could be withdrawn from the beginning and added to the end of the day, how many advantages would be gained by all, and in particular by those who spend in the open air, when light permits them to do so, whatever time they have at their command after the duties of the day have been discharged.'

Not every country has daylight saving, only about 70 of them, and that does not include Japan (?!). Russia had to be different - they go two hours ahead instead of one. Most equatorial and tropical countries do not observe daylight saving, because their daylight hours don't change that much with the change of seasons. And for all the multitudes living in Antarctica, daylight saving is observed. Here in Australia, we began observing it during World War 1.

Funnily enough, despite the inconvenience, daylight saving has had some benefits, at least for two busloads of people in Israel in 1999. A group of Palistinian terrorists decided they would bomb a couple of buses. But they stuffed up - Israel switches back to standard time before the Palistinian West Bank, so the terrorists set off the bombs one hour early. The only victims then, fortunately, were the terrorists themselves.

In the light of that, I guess we better keep observing daylight saving in the hopes that in the future it might stuff up a few terrorist operations, and a few more people will arrive late at meetings so that we can laugh at them, and all of us will have an excuse for being tired at least one day of the year.