Eric Reasons

OK, daylight savings time is not about the "spring-forward" or "fall-back" days that mildly inconvenience us. I love DST, and here's why: It's about getting the sun to rise somewhere between 5 AM and 7 AM year round, as best as possible, in every given time zone. Without it, here in Detroit, we'd have a sunrise on June 21st at 4:55 AM. That's a lot of wasted daylight, but it's not the worst thing in the world. However, we're on the forgiving western edge of a timezone. On the other side of the Eastern Time Zone, Bangor Maine would have a 3:49 AM sunrise on June 21st. Let's all accept this as unacceptable and move along. So why not just go to DST all year round you might ask? We on the western edge of a timezone would suffer the most! Over on the east edge of the timezone (Bangor, again), on the solstice, they'd get an 8:00 AM start, and sunset at 4:54 PM. They can muddle through that, I suppose. However, on the western edge, l...

I wrote this post 7 years ago in a facebook feature so old that its now deprecated. I'm posting here for two reasons: it's still relevant and I don't want to lose it. --------- We've been summoning up the imagery from 9/11/2001 so often over the past seven years, that the events of that day become a sort of abstract reference to itself. Speeches honoring the victims and heroes each year draw us ever further from the visceral experience of that day.  Of course we've been hearing all about it today, and mostly it just sort of hung around in the back of my head all day, without much impact on me, and certainly no more than any of the previous 5 anniversaries of that day. I was in class late tonight, so I haven't been around the house much. I walked outside to let the dog back in, and an airplane passed overhead. Then the real memories of September 11th flooded back to me. I remember around this time of night seven years ago, after a day of silent skies, the f...