Daylight Savings Kills Terrorists

If one more person reminds me to set my clock back, "Aaaarrrghghggh!" But seriously thanks, everyone. Although I will probably still forget. Nowadays with cell phones and electronic devices that automatically change the time things can get really confusing. One year I changed the time on my PDA before I went to bed, but then the PDA also changed the time automatically in the middle of the night. Then it woke me up two hours off schedule. I was really confused.

Today I read an interesting article in the Washington Post by Monica Hess entitled "It's Not Just a Matter of Time." In it Hess talks about why different parts of the country and world refuse to accept the practice of daylight savings. She writes,

What these time change wars are really all about, of course, is a sense of control. Over our daily schedules, over our national identity and, in the bigger sense, over the one thing that waits for no man. We cannot stop the march of time, but we can stop clocks, even wind them back an hour once a year.

It is pretty funny when you think about it. We try to control things and make ourselves more productive and efficient by all pretending that we can change the time. What if we all started freelance time-changing just to suite our individual preferences? That would be a mess. "I was going to be late for our meeting today so I set my clock back an hour. It's now 10AM in my universe."

Anyway, back to the Post article. Did you know that they not only don't practice daylight savings in China, but they don't have time-zones? Hess writes, "The entire country is set to Beijing, meaning 9 a.m. is still dark for some citizens and practically the middle of the afternoon for others." Wild.

But the most interesting portion of the article (and now you'll understand the title of this post) is the closing paragraph that tells the story of terrorists who literally died because of a time change. Have you ever heard this story?

Back in 1999, terrorists on the daylight-saving West Bank built several time bombs, delivered to co-conspirators in Israel and scheduled to explode at a set time. Problem was, Israel had just switched back to standard time, so the only people injured were the terrorists themselves when the bomb detonated an hour earlier than they expected and killed them all.

If only all terrorists were so easily thwarted. Okay, one more time: "Don't forget to set your clocks back." Goodnight.