Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

I’m not a Van Halen fan, and I normally don’t give a flying crap about celebrities. But I saw this picture of Eddie Van Halen on Fox News this morning and I was stunned.

I know exactly what it’s like to have a bad picture of you displayed publicly, and I have nothing personal against the guy because I don’t know him or his music. But the Eddie Van Halen I remember from when I was a kid looked like this.

No wonder he’s going into rehab. The past 10 years or so seem to have been very hard on the poor guy. If he keeps living like this, he could look even worse in another decade.

Good luck with rehab, dude.

Late addendum:

I learned the story of time zones in American government schools in the 1980s. I apologize if my accounting doesn’t resemble actual fact. In any case, the reasoning and the point behind it are the same.

A century and a half ago, America was being connected by the railroad. It was possible to board a train early in the morning and be somewhere far away by sunset. A constant problem travelers experienced was a difference in time. Every locality seemed to have its own somewhat arbitrary idea of what the current time was, and when you stepped off the train at your destination, you had no way to know the local time unless someone told you what it was. Planning and keeping appointments was very difficult.

Obviously other parts of the world experienced the same problem, so time zones were created. The Earth was divided into 24 zones, each zone correlating to 15 degrees of the Earth’s 360 degree sphere, or the distance the sun travels in one hour relative to the Earth’s surface. The longitude point passing through the observatory in Grenwich, England, became the reference point from which other time zone values were determined.

This map shows time zones as they exist today. Click it for an enlarged graphic. The zones don’t strictly follow longitude lines because of practical and political considerations, but the overall idea is obviously present.

Sometime during World War II, at least in the United States, Daylight Savings Time was implemented, allegedly for the purpose of conserving electricity by skipping one hour so the sun would be up longer during the regular human day. Perhaps that was a good idea at the time, considering American’s electric generating ability was almost certainly a fraction of what it is now.

DST then became institutionalized and for decades we’ve skipped an hour every spring and added an hour every fall. More than a year back, the geniuses who write our laws decided that DST would begin at the completely arbitrary second Sunday in March (instead of the completely arbitrary first Sunday in April) and end at the completely arbitrary first Sunday in November (as opposed to the completely arbitrary last Sunday in October), extending DST by about a month. Their excuse: Save electricity! What a load of bullshit.

Changing the date for DST doesn’t make my furnace run any less. The weather on March 11 this year will be what it will be regardless what time my clock says. Changing the clock so I’m awake for an extra hour of sunlight doesn’t mean the sun is actually in the sky for another hour to warm the Earth, so my savings are zero.

My refrigerator runs as often as it needs to keep food cold no matter what time it is. My stove uses the electricity necessary to cook my dinner regardless of the clock. My water heater doesn’t give a damn what time it is. The outdoor lights at my house stay on for the same amount of time because the length of the night doesn’t change because we shift our clocks. The computer equipment in my house runs as often as it needs to without regard to the time. My television comes on when the shows I like come on, whether the sun is up or not.

Energy savings my ass.

“But what about lights? Because the sun is up later in the day, you don’t have to turn on the lights, and you save electricity!” What you’ll save by leaving the lights off for an hour is minimal. I’ll tell you how to really save energy, if you’re so damn concerned: Turn off the shit you’re not using right now. You know that bedroom light you leave on all the time, even when you’re not in there? Turn it the hell off. When you’re in the basement folding laundry, turn off the TV upstairs you’re not watching. Turn your furnace down and wear a sweater. I guarantee a change in your personal behavior, rather than a change in the law, will do much more to save energy.

And if you want an extra hour of daylight, get out of bed an hour earlier.

DST is stupid, and there’s no real justification for it. At least two states and four territories in the US don’t recognize it, and half the world by location, and likely population, doesn’t recognize it. Most importantly, the fact that clocks move ahead or behind an arbitrary number of hours at arbitrary dates at some places in this country and at some places in the world totally defeats the purpose of providing consistent, predictable time, the reason for time zones to begin with.

Thanks idiots.