Constable: Weather's great, but no daylight after work to enjoy it
The thermometer should edge into the 70s today. Too bad it will be too dark to see it.
Our giddiness about the return of glorious fall weather is tempered by the arrival of winter's darkness. Monday afternoon at 4:44 p.m., when most suburban cubicle workers were counting the minutes until they could leave their jobs and frolic in the September-like weather, a November nighttime fell over suburbia as if it were a cosmic wet blanket. The sun sets at 4:43 today and 4:41 on Wednesday, continuing a bearish market on sunshine that will last until late December.
At least today, commuters will drive home with their windows down and their headlights on.
The end of daylight saving time, the oft-misunderstood, always-confusing time-manipulation that has us falling back an hour every fall, gave us a 25-hour day on Sunday. I used my extra hour to wander around my house and change the time on our toaster oven, microwave, coffee maker, radio and a handful of actual clocks. In exchange for one Sunday morning when we could sleep an hour later, we get to drive home from work in the dark until March 13, 2016, when we spring forward, lose an hour of sleep, but get to keep the sun around until 6:55 p.m.
While Monday seemed like the longest workday in history, most of us eventually adjust to the new time. I grew up in an Indiana town that followed the daylight saving time pattern used by Chicago. But our nearest neighbors a quarter-mile away kept the same time all year long. This led to us being in different time zones for half the year, with some people following "slow time" and others being on "fast time." High school basketball games became math word problems: "If your home games start at 7 p.m. but the team you're playing on the road starts their games at 6:30 p.m., and you are on 'fast time' and they are on 'slow time,' and it takes the school bus 45 minutes to get there, meaning you could arrive 15 minutes before you left, should you even bother?"
At the moment daylight saving time ended early Sunday, it was possible to have one twin born at 1:59 a.m. and his younger brother born earlier at 1:01 a.m. Daylight saving time has some history as a matter of life and death. According to a National Public Radio report from September 1999, three terrorists were plotting to blow up a couple of busloads of people in Israel. But they lived in a zone following daylight saving time and their intended victims did not, which made setting the time bombs confusing. The bombs detonated an hour earlier than expected, killing the three bomb smugglers before they had a chance to put their diabolical plan into action.
Some people credit or blame the American farmer for the creation of daylight saving time, but that just isn't the case. Benjamin Franklin, with his "early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise" quip, sometimes is considered the father of daylight saving time for a satirical essay he wrote in 1784 proposing a seasonal time change in Paris. But, according to timeanddate.com, ancient civilizations often changed the time to suit their sunlight needs.
In 1895, New Zealand entomologist George Vernon Hudson proposed a two-hour time shift from October to March. British builder William Willett proposed a complicated series of 20-minute weekly time changes in 1905. In 1916, Germany became the first nation to officially implement daylight saving time as a way to save fuel for the World War I effort. The United States adopted a version of it in 1918 and again during World War II. In 1966, Congress passed the Uniform Time Act, which set the dates for daylight saving time but allowed states to bypass the time change. The energy crisis and concerns about children trick-or-treating after dark led to tinkering with the dates. Indiana adopted daylight saving time in 2006, but most of Arizona and all of Hawaii don't use it.
My advice is for you to ignore the darkness and enjoy the rare warm day in November. I remember being in a 73-degree Grant Park on the night Barack Obama won the presidential election on Nov. 4, 2008. I had high hopes for outdoor plans on this Nov. 4, too. I figured I'd be downtown on this perfect Wednesday, watching the parade honoring the 2015 World Champion Chicago Cubs.