Quit Messing with my Clock

I don't do well with this Daylight Savings Time thing. Every year, around the start of October, then again in April, I wake up on some Monday in a panic that the whole world has remembered to set their clocks back but me, and that I'm now either an hour ahead of or behind the rest of the world, and they're all laughing at me.

My wife resets all the clocks in the house because she's a good person. I'm too disorganized a person to do that. I suspect that she does it as soon as possible every year because she knows it would not go well if I did it. I can easily see me setting the kitchen clock, setting clocks upstairs, getting distracted, having some beers, remembering that I didn't set the kitchen clock and thus setting it again, making it totally wrong, and probably using that wrongness to reset all the rest of the clocks to match the kitchen clock. We'll call that the Idiot Time Zone.

In the twenty or so years that I've owned vehicles, I don't think I've ever gotten around to resetting the clock in one, and so it stays an hour off until the world changes their clocks back, or it drives my wife nuts enough that she does it for me, whichever comes first.

Given that I'm already an idiot, and already bad at daylight savings time, you can imagine my distress at having just learned that thanks to President Numbnuts and his stupid Energy Bill, next year they're extending Daylight Savings time. That's right, the energy bill that they signed into law in August will change the date we change our clocks. Here's a little sumpin-sumpin about it from Wikipedia:

Starting March 11, 2007, daylight saving time will be extended another four to five weeks, from the second Sunday of March to the first Sunday of November. The change was introduced by the Energy Policy Act of 2005; the House had originally approved a motion that would have extended DST even further. Proponents claimed that the extension would save "the equivalent of" 10,000 barrels of oil per day, but this figure was based on U.S. Department of Energy information from the 1970s, the accuracy and relevance of which the DoE no longer stands by. There is very little recent research on what the actual positive effects, if any, might be.

Yeah, this will be a disaster for me.
I was actually reading up on the Energy Policy Act because of the news of Exxon's profits caught my eye. In case you missed this:

IRVING, Texas - Exxon Mobil Corp. had a quarter for the record books. The world's largest publicly traded oil company said Thursday high oil and natural-gas prices helped its third-quarter profit surge almost 75 percent to $9.92 billion, the largest quarterly profit for a U.S. company ever, and it was the first to ring up more than $100 billion in quarterly sales.
Revenue grew to $100.72 billion from $76.38 billion in the prior-year period.

Gas prices went through the roof, for no good reason that I heard, and coincidently Exxon Mobil made more money than any company in the history of man. Huh.

Maybe it's time to steer some major tax dollars into other sources of energy eh?

I remembered ol' George's Energy Bill, so I went to read about it and was quite disappointed to find that while there is funding for research and increased use of altenative energy sources, there are also billions of dollars of tax incentives and direct funding for oil companies. Yes, Exxon-Mobil, a company that made more money than any company in history, is getting tax dollars from our government to develop new places to drill. I used to think our president was a boob, but now I think he's a genius. The man's family money comes from oil, and he pulls this slickery right in front of the American people and gets away with it. That's genius.

I don't like him because he messed with my clocks, and I don't support him because he's taking my money and giving it to the superwealthy. I don't trust him because he's appointing cronies, hacks, and people named "Scooter." Still, you have to respect him... don't you?