By Dr. Sherwood Burr
Hello again, friends, it’s me your old friend She-Bu. You like the new nickname? I gave it to myself.
I’d have written sooner but I spent the past few weeks being detained at the police station in St. Petersburg. For some reason the Russians are really suspicious of Americans these days. I couldn’t tell you why.
I was there visiting an old buddy, Petr, and the next thing I knew we were at this sick party on a yacht in the Baltic Sea. We pretended to be Swedish delivery men bringing meatballs from Ikea. The guys hosting us told us we could stay but we had to do a line, and I was like “you mean from a movie?” so I shouted, “Yo, Adrian. I did it!” and the guy was like, no, and pointed to a bag of sugar and I was like “OK, who doesn’t like free sugar?” and the next day I woke up on the beach wearing only my left sleeve and shoes that weren’t mine.
The police thought I was an American spy but when they contacted the CIA, I overheard the woman on the other end say, “That guy’s over there? Thank God. Keep him,” and she hung up. They sent me home the next day, and I even got to keep the roomy sweatpants they gave me. Win, win.
But enough about my professional life, let’s talk Daylight Saving Time. This Sunday at 2 a.m. we need to “spring forward”, which reminds me that I have to disengage that bear trap I have next to the mailbox. For the rest of you, that just means moving your clocks ahead an hour. It’s also fine to move it ahead two hours to be on the safe side, or just a few minutes a day for a couple weeks so you don’t rush into it. Afterall, time is just a construct.
Daylight Saving Time began in 1908 in Port Arthur, Ontario, Canada. Citizens there advanced their clocks 17 kilotimpos – the metric equivalent of an hour – that spring and a phenomenon was born. Other countries soon adopted it, though Switzerland was hesitant because of the disorientation it was causing the live cuckoos it was using in its clocks at the time.
Advocates, like noted inventor and French mistress boinker Ben Franklin, claim it saves energy while critics say that it disrupts sleep cycles and contributes to mental fatigue leading to car accidents and heart attacks. I tend to agree with the latter. I adjusted my clock in 2006 and I haven’t had an erection since.
Critics also point out that one can’t actually “save” daylight, but that’s not entirely true. My great aunt Gladys had several Mason jars that glowed bright all night long. Tucked between the tomatoes and the lima beans, those jars illuminated the entire basement of her home. “God lets those who are pure of heart keep a little sunlight for those dark days,” she’d say to me. I started to question that after her war crimes trial at the Hague, but I also had a lot to learn.
Dr. Sherwood Burr appears courtesy of the Kane Institute for Rectal Integrity, a startup where he’s been a researcher and a test subject since January.
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