Today’s the first day of DST, and the nation is vexed by tired workers and dangerous motorists. To hear the opponents of the change tell it (and they’re never are quite as vocal in the fall). Maybe there’s something to their charges, but I’ve lived in a temperate-zone country where the time does not change, namely Japan. At the height of summer, the morning sun would wake me up at around 4 a.m. and my non-air conditioned apartment would be hot already by the time I had to get up for work.

It’s then, when you’re lying in bed feeling the sweat rising at 5 a.m., that you think: maybe taking this useless hour of daylight and dropping it into the evening is good idea. That is to say, I’m not persuaded that getting rid of DST would cure much of what ails us.

On the other hand, early March to early November isn’t quite right either. Better the way it was before Congress tinkered with it in 2005 – first Sunday in April to the last one in October, or even the way it was from 1967 to 1986, when it was the last Sunday in April to the last Sunday in October.

I looked at this map today because of the change, but also because it’s always a good day to look at a map. I wondered, what’s up with that corner of British Columbia that doesn’t change their clocks? Wiki says: “Part of the Peace River Regional District of BC (including the communities of Chetwynd, Dawson Creek, Hudson’s Hope, Fort St. John, Taylor and Tumbler Ridge) is on Mountain Time and does not observe DST. This means that the region would be on the same time as Mountain Standard Time (MST) in the winter, and Pacific Daylight Time (PDT) in the summer.” Hm.

One more thing: the change brings to mind this charming song, which is mostly lost to time.

I like the video that bsgs98 made. Where do you get so many pictures of people and paper moons? Google images, of course. But I also wondered, how exactly did the custom of sitting for a photo with a paper moon start, how long did it last, and why did it die out? A simple search doesn’t tell me, and I’m too lazy to dig around more (for now).

A quick check does reveal that there were many covers of the “Moonlight Saving Time,” but among those I’ve heard, I prefer Guy Lombardo’s version. The song was written by Irving Kahal and Harry Richman in the early ’30s, and it’s amazing the things you can find with a little creative Googling.

The Milwaukee Sentinel, in a squib published on June 17, 1934, said: “It was in the spring, three years ago, on the night that New York went on daylight saving time that he [Richman] thought up the title. There was a beautiful moon and the idea occurred to Harry that ‘Moonlight Saving Time’ would be a good title. Next day, he and Irving Kahal wrote the song.”