quasigrecian thoughts

[calimac]

1. When you've been together mumblety years, it gets hard to think of Valentine's presents. B and I agreed that my present to her this year would be to set up her new heavy-duty music stand that arrived yesterday. I tackled that this morning. There were no instructions, and I'd never done this before; figuring out how it went together turned out to be rather entertaining. I also figured out how to set it up left-handed.

2. Now that South Carolina is the next stop on the primary trail, may we have a ban on referring to it as "the Palmetto state"? This article uses that term and then quotes two other articles using it. Enough! Nobody calls it that in actual discourse except tourism officials and bad writers desperately looking for a synonym so they don't have to use the actual name again, the equivalent of the fiction-writer's saidbookisms.

3. Four more orderings for the episodes of The Prisoner. That makes 13 different orders of the 17 episodes that I know of. Sine qua non, for me, since everybody agrees on the first one and the last two: "The General" comes immediately before "A, B, & C", not after it. I am now in the process of comparing them all to determine the ideal consensus order.

4. Eliminating time zones strikes me as a dumb idea. The main advantage of having different time zones is that they tell people in other time zones what time it is where you are, duh. Since the reformers are not proposing that we set our work hours by UTC and go to the office in the middle of the night, we'd still need to consult other places' local time (a concept they acknowledge we'd need to introduce) when we needed to deal with them on a real-time basis. The local time would become the "real" time (just ask anyone currently living in a place which unofficially defies the legal time zone): it has a huge psychological effect - if it didn't, we wouldn't need DST. We already have UTC for operations where local time is insignificant, like astronomical date stamps. This reform would only make life more confusing. Since you say the main problem with time zones is that they keep being changed, and you acknowledge you'd need to get the politicians on board for your reform, why don't you just try getting them on board for not tinkering with the time zones all the damn time?

Comments

[kevin-standlee.livejournal.com]

My state is the next stop on the candidate tour, as the Nevada caucuses are February 20. I was initially worried that I'd have to go clear to Yerrington, the county seat, to participate, but there are precincts in Fernley as well. This will be my first time voting in a caucus state, having been a Californian all my life through the previous presidential cycle.

Lisa periodically says she wants to abolish time zones and use UTC for everything, but I agree with you that it would cause more problems than it solves.

I've noticed in my Day Jobbe dealing with supplier data from various sources that in some respects I think that Apple, Microsoft, Google, and other US west coast tech giants want to make US Pacific Time the de facto world standard time, for their convenience.

Regarding calendar reform: I rather thought that Tolkien's Shire calendar was a nearly ideal solution, including the fact that one day per year (plus leap year day) would have no weekday name, so you'd always be able to use the same calendar every year.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

As a former child, I recall having enjoyed having my birthday fall on different days of the week each year, so I wasn't stuck going to school on my birthday every year.

[thnidu.livejournal.com]

Y'know, H&H, not everybody spends most of their time involved with stuff on a worldwide scale. Anyone who needs to access UTC can do so -- as an addicted Wikipedian, I do it all the time. But almost all my other interactions are with people living near me, in the same time zone, and I'm comfortable with the way things are now.

Except daylight saving time. That's a massive waste of energy, time, and sleep, and a major cause of accidents.