Now that you’re beginning to recover from the rigors and discomforts of arising an hour earlier than any sane person would, you might be interested to hear about a group of people who take Daylight Savings Time seriously. Not just seriously: really, really seriously. This group, whose members, our inside sources reveal, call themselves the DST Extremists, was founded in New Liberty, South Dakota, by Tina Fugimoto, some time during the summer of 1998.1
Curious to find out what this strange secret society was all about, The Flying News has spent the last three months sleeping and waking at the strangest hours, attempting—successfully, we should add—to establish our bona fides for the purpose of infiltrating the DST Extremists. As a result, we can now give some report of the aims and activities of this mysterious cabal. In fact, we are now in a position to relay the following excerpt from a top secret manifesto called The Top Secret Foundations of Time:
To attempt to establish a schedule based on the regular rotation of a clock, varied only by the twice annual adjustment of a mere hour, is a tyranny little less severe than the barbaric primitivism of regulating one’s life by the sun. Let us, rather, seize our freedom with both hands, and eschew, abhor, and despise the governance of our life by any such mechanical regulation.
In order to “carry out this great emancipation,” DST Extremists synchronize their lives to a random number generator housed in New Liberty.
What this means is best made clear by some examples:
- One day, five o’clock might occur three or four times, while on the next day, it might not occur at all.2
- While nobody has yet been able to determine what the largest (or smallest) possible hour might be, times such as 43,574 o’clock, -.0013 o’clock, and 12.33 + 5i o’clock are not uncommon.
- Happy hour can be very long, but, since no bars are known to practice Extreme DST, the bar may not be open.
“Drawing of Man Waking in Bed” (c. 1900). Illustration to The Awakening, by Leo Tolstoy. Public Domain.
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Dear sirs,
You spelled Daylight Saving Time wrong. It is SAVING, not SAVINGS. There are no SALES on TIME. I take this VERY seriously. This is the 1,324th webpage I have corrected today, and I still have at least 13,786 to go based on the automatic webcrawler script I created to find every page that spells it wrong. Oh, it found another. Well, I’d better get on to the next one. Goodbye.