Drunken Pumpkin

Jam jars store jam, the Sun jar collects and stores sunshine so that you can use it at night.

Available at Suck.UK.com

Some Inuit say they hope scientists coming to Nunavut for research as part of International Polar Year can help shed light on changes they’re seeing in the sun — particularly, how it’s been showing up more often in the usually always-dark winters.

“The people [are] talking about earlier sunrise, more light in the dark season, instead of being more total darkness than before,” Grise Fiord resident Larry Audlaluk said Thursday, adding that he has heard similar observations from people in other Far North communities.

“There are notices of more daylight earlier, and the dark season is not the real dark season that we used to know.”

CBC.ca

“Everyone appreciates the long, light evenings. Everyone laments their shortage as Autumn approaches; and everyone has given utterance to regret that the clear, bright light of an early morning during Spring and Summer months is so seldom seen or used.”

Many people have heard that Benjamin Franklin first proposed Daylight Savings Time, however the idea was first seriously pursued by William Willett, a London builder.

A lengthier background on this crackpot can be found here

I have a sneaking suspicion that our numbers may drop a little today. Why? Well, as today is the first day of the New start of Daylight Saving Time most of our readers will probably already have had their fill of getting dirty looks from the boss by coming into work an hour late.

I have never really grasped the idea of Saving daylight. The idea strikes me as very similar to trying to keep a snowball to give to your friends in Florida. And, trust me, when you try that all you get is a pocket full of cold water and the feeling that you’ve just had a very cold pee in your pants.

Maybe my problem with the idea is the fact that I tend to lose tangible things with a startling regularity. You know how it is, you get that check from your parents on your birthday and you put it somewhere “safe” until you have some time to go cash it. Next thing you know you find it two years later when you move and it falls out of some book you haven’t touched in ages. Now, try doing that with something you can’t actually see. It could be decades before you sort out just where you hid that spare hour that someone stole from you saved for you.

I do like the idea that Congress is trying to move back the dates on Daylight Saving Time. My personal suggestion is that they shift it even further. Say, start on January 1st and end on December 31st. Maybe I should write my Congressmen about that.

Stay tuned for more fun with saving daylight this week on Drunken Pumpkin.