My Annual Bitch about Daylight Savings Time

Quick quiz:  Are we currently on Standard Time or DST (Dumb as Shit Time)?  Now ask the same question of a couple of friends.  When I tried this, the answers were pretty evenly split.  I’ll give you the correct answer farther down.

There is an awful lot of misinformation about DST floating around out there.  No, the Romans didn’t use DST.  I don’t know who started this silly internet myth, but the Romans did not have accurate mechanical clocks and depended on either sundials or water clocks.  The Romans divided the daylight into twelve parts, and since the length of the day varied with the season, so did the times.  If you had tried to explain the concept of DST to a Roman, he would have just asked why you didn’t get up either earlier or later, as you saw fit.  

Nor was DST invented by Benjamin Franklin.  While serving as the American Ambassador to France in 1784, Franklin wrote a letter to The Journal of Paris, a daily newspaper, suggesting that Parisians could save a small fortune spent on candles if they would just shift their clocks an hour, to use more daylight.  Since then, proponents of screwing around with our clocks have suggested that if a man as wise as Franklin supported DST, we should adopt it.

What these morons fail to notice however is that Franklin’s letter was satire.  It was a joke.  Franklin didn’t really want to make the blanket longer by cutting off a foot at the top and then sewing it back onto the bottom.

And no—periodically messing around with our clocks doesn’t save either energy or money.  Two different government studies concluded that DST either saves negligible amounts of energy or actually increases the cost of lighting our homes.  Think about it for a second:  do businesses and schools routinely turn off the lights indoors during the day and get by on just the light from windows?  Do you have lights on during the day in your house?  

Careful computer modeling of energy costs by the hour suggests that the farther north you live, the more likely that DST might save you an insignificant amount of energy costs.  If you live in North Dakota, you might see 0.5% reduction on your heating and lighting costs.  If you live somewhere warmer, say in the high deserts of New Mexico, messing around with your clocks probably sends your energy bills up an equal amount.  

There are other costs associated with time switching.  The disruption in sleep patterns caused by the shift to DST has been linked to various health issues.  Studies show increases in heart attacks, strokes, and depression immediately following the clock changes, especially in the spring.  The hour lost in March can worsen sleep deprivation and increase stress levels, with some research suggesting that this impacts long-term health and well-being.

Adjusting to DST leads to a temporary drop in productivity.  Sleep-deprived workers are less efficient, and studies have shown that in the week after the clocks shift forward in spring, they suffer an increase in workplace injuries and make more mistakes.  This downtime from inefficiency and injuries adds hidden economic costs.

DST is associated with a higher risk of traffic crashes, particularly on the Monday following the Spring shift.  The abrupt change can make people drowsier behind the wheel, leading to more crashes.  Studies have shown an increase in fatal car crashes by 6% in the days following the switch.

So why don’t we end this nonsense and just leave our clocks alone all year long, like countries around the world have already done?  Many politicians have suggested doing just that, but legislation always fails to pass because politicians can’t agree on whether to just end DST or implement it all year long.  It’s kind of like our politicians all agree that eating pizza is a great idea but can’t decide if they are hungry enough to have the pizza cut into eight slices or just six. 

As the law stands today, any state can decide to end DST—as Arizona and Hawaii have already done—but the states are forbidden to implement DST all year long (that being a right reserved for Congress).  Here’s a wild thought:  Let’s stop messing around with the clocks and just change the time that stores and schools open.  

Nah.  That will never work.  However, if we can seasonally adjust our clocks, why stop there?

Let’s seasonally adjust our scales.  Every year in the Fall, let’s adjust our scales down by ten pounds so that every American can really enjoy the holidays.  Then we can eat all the Halloween candy we want and pig out on Thanksgiving and Christmas, because all of us have received a free ten-pound reduction in our weight.  

Of course, when Spring rolls around and we adjust the scales back up, we’ll have to work off the extra weight.  But we can adjust for that and simply increase everybody’s height by six inches, which should average out the body mass index.  And what short person wouldn’t want to be taller for half the year?

My wife gave me a great little convertible for my retirement.  In the summer, it’s too hot in New Mexico to not use the air conditioner, but the rest of the year has wonderful weather to drive with the top down.  How about we seasonally raise the speed limit by twenty miles an hour in the fall and then drop them in summer?

And the holidays are expensive, let’s seasonally adjust our bank accounts.  Just add $1000 to everyone’s bank account before Thanksgiving, then take it back in February.  It’s too cold to do anything fun in February anyway….  Wait, if we added about 20 degrees to the thermometer in late fall, then dropped it 40 degrees in the summer, we could have “temperate” weather all year long!  In your face Hawaii!

Now if any of these suggestions sounds ludicrous, please tell me how they differ from screwing about with our clocks.  (And for the record, we are on Standard Time.  Temporarily.)

The Astronomer

If you go to the Louvre (which is the most famous art museum in the world), the most crowded room is always Room 38, the Salle des États.  There is always a throng of camera-wielding tourists who are trying to take the definitive photograph of the most reproduced work of art in the world, the Mona Lisa.  Most of these tourists will leave slightly disappointed, since the painting is smaller than most imagine, it is firmly secured behind several inches of bullet-proof glass, and its protective varnish coating has become so dark in the two centuries since it was last replaced that it is hard to see any details of the painting.

At right is a view of the reverse of the Mona Lisa—the view the museum rarely shows.  If you watched the recent movie, The Glass Onion, you know they mistakenly showed the painting on canvas but as you can see, it is actually painted on a poplar wood panel.

If you go there, ignore the Mona Lisa because the gift shop will sell you a postcard that gives you a much better image than you can see competing to stand in front of the painting, itself.  Instead, look around the room at some of the Louvre’s most famous paintings that are all in the same room and which are, for the most part, completely ignored.  The Virgin and Child with St. Anne is there (also by Leonardo da Vinci), along with The Coronation of Napoleon by Jacques-Louis David.  One painting that is hard to miss is the Wedding at Cana by Paolo Veronese (It’s the largest painting in the museum).

That last painting, The Wedding at Cana, really shouldn’t even be in the Louvre, since Napoleon looted it from Venice.  In the last two centuries Venice has demanded it back several times, but the Louvre says it is too fragile to survive the trip.  Recently, the Museum gave Venice a high-resolution copy of the painting and declared the matter closed.  (It costs 15 Euros to enter the museum and it won’t accept high-resolution copies of the currency.) 

When you are finished viewing the paintings in Room 38, go up to the second floor to room 837 in the Richelieu Wing.  There you will find two incredible Vermeer paintings.  The first is The Lacemaker, in which a young woman is depicted, focused intently on her lace-making.  She sits at a table with various lace-making tools and materials, illustrating Vermeer’s masterful use of light and texture.  

The second painting is The Astronomer, in which a scholar is seen who is deeply engaged in his studies.  The painting shows a man seated at a desk that is covered with books and scientific instruments, such as a globe and a book of astronomical charts.  The man wears a Japanese robe—garb that was reserved for scholars at the time.  

The Astronomer originally was part of a pendent painting—a pair of paintings with the same theme.  This painting was meant to be displayed with another Vermeer painting, The Geographer, that depicts the same man studying a globe.  Both paintings were produced during a period when scientific discoveries were sweeping through Europe.

Both works were signed by Vermeer and both works used the same model, who is believed to be Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, the self-taught scientist and the founder of the field of microbiology.  

The two paintings remained together for over a century, being sold to various owners.  Such sales were usually part of estate sales after the deaths of their owners.  In 1803, at one such sale, the two paintings were finally separated.  After many sales, The Geographer was sold to the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, in 1885, where it remains today, while The Astronomer was sold to Alphonse James de Rothschild, and it stayed in the family until the Rothschilds sold it to the French Government in partial payment of estate taxes in 1983.  The little brass plaque at the Louvre explains this to the viewer.

What the brass plaque does not explain is that for a few years, the painting was part of the personal collection of Adolf Hitler.

Although it is common knowledge that the Nazis looted artwork—particularly art owned by Jewish families—from all of occupied Europe, it is less well known that both Hitler and Goring had lists of artworks of special interest that that were actively hunted for the Nazi leaders’ personal art collections.

While there is evidence that The Astronomer spent some time in Hitler’s personal residence, by the war’s end, the painting had been put in storage, awaiting the construction of the  Führermuseum, to be built in Linz, Austria, that Hitler envisioned to showcase “his” vast collection of art.  

Hitler planned on building the largest and best art museum in the world and planned to fill it with the finest art in the world.  It was not revealed until after the war that Hitler actually had compiled a list of the art works he wanted (including art from both the United States and the Soviet Union).  The fact that all of the art in his museum was to be be stolen didn’t matter to der Fuehrer.  

After the war, the Allies’ Monuments Men recovered the painting from a salt mine of Altaussee  returned the painting to the Rothschild Family.  The photo at right shows the actual recovery of the Vermeer painting.

When the Nazis took the painting, they stamped the reverse of the painting with a Swastika in black ink.  It’s still there, and while the Louvre will share a photo of the back of the Mona Lisa with the public, it won’t publish a photo of the back of The Astronomer.

And that’s okay, we don’t need to see it…It’s only the front of the painting that is important.