The Required Amount at the Prescribed Rate (Handcrafted From the Finest Corinthian Leather)
Dave Fights Through His Day Like Mike Tyson Will Fight Jake Paul
Daylight Sucking Time
Rage, rage! Against the dying of the light!
My wife has banned me from ranting about Daylight Saving Time to her, so I'll do it here instead: New Jersey is experiencing the finest fall weather possible-- mid-60s and sunny and dry-- and this lovely sunlight has been stolen . . .. stolen! . . . by these bureaucratic time manipulators who need to justify their job by changing the clocks . . . I could be enjoying several hours of this beautiful weather after school lets out but because we decided to "fall back," now it gets dark at 4:30 PM . . . why? why? why not just leave the clocks on Daylight Saving Time, use lights in the morning, and enjoy tennis, hiking, dog-walking, etc. in the evening . . . this seems like a no-brainer-- plus we avoid the shitty feeling of feeling "off" because the clocks have been moved . . . I just don't get it.
Daylight Saving Time: Catastrophe and Miracle
Dreams Are Dumb?
I've always been a proponent of the Anti-Freudian "dreams are dumb and indicate nothing" school-of-thought (and may COVID-19 kill me dead if this blog becomes a dream journal) but I woke up at 2 AM this morning-- possibly because of an earthquake-- in the midst of a particularly vivid and possibly symbolic somnolent vision; here's what happened:
I was trekking through the jungle at sunset and came to a spot where I could see through the dense foliage and I spotted a hippo in the tall grass, and the hippo's wet skin was reflecting beautiful streaks of red, purple, and orange from the waning daylight and then a jaguar walked out of the jungle and he hopped up on top of the hippo and just stood there, posing (and there was also a random llama in the background) and so I grabbed my phone and took a picture of a JAGUAR ON TOP OF A HIPPO (with a llama in the background) and all three animals were magnificent, iridescent from the setting sun in this wild tableau and then I raced back to camp to show Catherine the miracle I had witnessed and when I tried to find the pictures on my phone, they were gone-- total technical failure-- and it was my fault, I had pressed something and lost them all, the greatest nature photos ever snapped . . . and that's pretty much how school feels so far this year.
Dave Conquers Daylight Savings Time?
I gave myself a break the morning after pub night (Friday morning) but then I went back into training on Saturday. I got up at 5 AM. On the weekend. That's dedication.
Here is a training video from Saturday morning. I hope you find it inspirational.
I drank a fair amount of beer on Saturday, watching the wild Rutgers/Purdue game (Rutgers won in OT!) and so I broke training on Sunday and slept in.
This morning, when my alarm went off, I was sleeping soundly, but my training paid off. I was able to rise and shine (to some extent). And I didn't have a heart attack or get into a car accident (both of which are more common right after Daylight Saving).
The transition was still a little abrupt, and so next year I am starting 60 DAYS in advance. I put a reminder on my Google calendar. I'm going to set my alarm one minute earlier each day for two months, an when the big day comes, the "springing ahead" will be totally smooth. The annoying thing, is that we could use computers to do this for us. We don't need to change the clocks a full hour on one particular day. We could use quantum easing over a span of many months and we wouldn't have this awful jarring Monday.
Until then, I will have to do it myself. I suggest you stop complaining and do the same.
Why? Why Why Why Why Why?
The Intrepid Adventures of Dave's Headphone Wire
How Did We Survive?
1) the veracity of the word "spackler," we were playing lots of Bananagrams and I used that word . . . but it looks like it's not a word;
2) the exact genetic origins of a mule . . . more on this tomorrow in a profanity-laced description of the North Kaibab trail;
3) the actual time . . . apparently, Arizona does not subscribe to Daylight Savings Time (but the Navajo Nation does) and so every ride was a crapshoot, because the GPS took this into consideration . . . sometimes . . . and we were operating with four different times-- the car clock said one thing, Cat's phone another, my phone a third time, and the clock in our cabin had a fourth (correct) time, but we never bothered to set anything to the correct time;
4) birds . . . we saw little blue birds (probably Pinyon Jays) and little birds with red heads and yellow bodies and all sorts of hummingbirds and we couldn't identify any of them;
5) the name for a group of ravens . . . everyone knows a group of crows is called a murder, but we kept seeing groups of ravens (usually consuming roadkill) and we didn't know that we could have referred to them as a "conspiracy" or an "unkindness" or a "constable";
6) what a decoy spider looks like;
7) if we could see Phil Torres getting attacked by a spitting cobra on a reality science show which never aired . . . we learned about this on a podcast called Talk Nerdy and the episode is great but you can't see the footage.
'tis the Season to Be Cranky
Seriously? Halloween on a Saturday? Combined With Daylight Saving Time? Who Let This Happen?
It's That Most Wonderful Time of the Year . . . Again
Together at Last: Daylight Saving Time and Skewed Data!
Fell On Black Days
Road Trip Day Four . . . I Begrudgingly Adjust to Central Time
Diligent readers are familiar with my rants about Daylight Savings Time, but this time I have nothing to complain about, as I've inflicted Central Time upon myself . . . so this sentence is going to be a little logy (can a sentence be logy? or just the author of it?) as I woke up at 4:30 AM Monday morning, and after reading some Bill Bryson (The Lost Continent) for inspiration, I did my favorite early morning thing to do at a hotel-- go to the hotel fitness center and give whatever odd workout devices they have a perfunctory try and then swim some laps in an empty pool-- and though I got an early start, I still had a great time in Chicago; the Shedd Aquarium is awe-inspiring-- even better than the one in Camden-- and the Art Institute is equal to the Met (I saw more Magritte paintings in Chicago than I did in Belgium) and the sculptures and fountains and architecture and skyline in Millennium Park are as beautiful (or more so) than they are in Central Park and the "L" train system is equally as complicated, confusing and expensive as the subway in The Big Apple . . . the CTA employee saved us a few bucks on tickets by sending us around the block to Walgreens to purchase some kind of re-loadable card and then she had to use her personal card to scan the kids at a discount . . . absurdity . . . and the gist of it all is this: I don't know why this surprises me so much-- perhaps because we drove across a sea of farmland-- and I should have known better . . . but Chicago is a real city!
I May Have Finally Defeated Daylight Savings Time
It's The Fortnight of Time
A Plea to Cronus: Obliterate Daylight Saving Time
Stop Reading This And Go To Bed!
Here are some of the things I learned while reading David K. Randall's book Dreamland: Adventures in the Strange Science of Sleep . . . and while his lessons are often commonsensical, he provides descriptions of how these truisms were scientifically proven:
1) We often dream about what bothers us;
2) We often dream the same thing over and over;
3) While dreams don't have symbolic meaning, they can help us solve actual problems in a creative fashion;
4) Better to sleep than to cram;
5) The West Coast team has an advantage when playing Monday Night Football;
6) You need sleep to synthesize new information;
7) If you are deprived of enough sleep, you die . . . from lack of sleep;
8) Friendly fire deaths in the military are most often caused by fatigue;
9) The biggest hurdle in the military is not technological, it is sleep deprivation;
10) If you didn't get a full night's rest, take a nap;
11) You can kill someone in your sleep, and depending on the interpretation of the law, you might either get life in prison or get off scot-free.
12) Teenagers have different Circadian rhythms than adults;
13) Highschools that pushed their start time to 8:30 had higher SAT scores, better attendance, less fights, and a number of other quantifiable improvements;
14) Some popular prescription sleeping pills don't actually improve sleep all that much, they just give the sleeper temporary amnesia, so that it improves the perception of how one has slept;
15) The electric light, the TV, and the computer are enemies of sleep, because they fool our brains into thinking it is still daylight, and thus ruin our Circadian rhythm;
16) Before the advent of the electric light, the computer, and the TV, humans had two sleeps: a first sleep from when the sun went down until around midnight, then there was an hour or two of wakefulness, where people often ate or fornicated or talked, and then a "second sleep" until morning;
17) Sleep apnea is scary . . .
and the final thing to take away from this book is that sleep is really, really important for humans-- important for our health, our minds, and our stress levels-- yet even though we know this, married couples usually share a bed that is too small for the two of them and sleep together despite snoring, flatulence, kicking, blanket-stealing, late night reading, and general disruptions . . . and studies found that women primarily do this because they want to feel safe and that men do it because you never know when you might get lucky, and nothing improves your luck more than proximity.