April the First, I trust nobody!

Look out for people who shout this after playing a trick on you!

Actually, the shout will be in Ukrainian: Pervoye Aprelya, nikomu ne veryu! There is only one place in the world where April Fools’ Day is a public holiday: Odessa, the romantic city on Ukraine’s Black Sea coast. Let’s indulge an idealistic hope that Odessa five days from now will have enough peace for its traditional festivities, parade, music, comic costumes, dressed-up statues, and roving clowns and pranksters. The day is called Humorina. The world could do with a day of laughter.

If All Fools’ Day originated, as some suggest, from the tale of the vain cockerel Chaunticleer duped by Reynard the Fox, as told in Chaurcer’s “Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” or perhaps Shakespeare’s  clownish dupe Bottom the Weaver (though that was in A Midsummer Night’s Dream), let’s hope that a future dramatist may tell the tale of how Russia’s warriors land in Odessa and are so bejeezled by merry pranksters that they spin giddily back into  the sea.

Unanimous Fools’ Day

On March 15, the Senate of March Hares passed the Sunshine Misunderstanding Act, by which clocks will be required to lie about what time of day it is, throughout the year, instead of just eight months of it.

You’re not an April fool! It actually happened. The Senators of the United States passed unanimously – unanimously – what they called the Sunshine Protection Act, by which (if the House proves equally stupid) “Daylight Saving Time” will replace standard time throughout the year. Clocks will not return to approximately true time on the first Sunday in November.

Could King Canute give orders to the sea? Can lawmakers “save” or “protect” the light of the Sun? “Senate” means a gathering of elders (Latin senex, “old”). Are they unanimously wise, or senile?

For the history and geography of the clock-twisting practice, and my opinion of it and of what would be the better solution, please see this page.

In a New York Times opinion piece titled “I Think I Just Solved Daylight Saving Time,” Peter Coy, a business writer, “discovers” what we’ve been pointing out: that the way to adapt to the varying length of daytime through the year is not for governments to order clock changes but for schools and workplaces to be allowed to open at times suitable for the seasons. His last paragraph quotes an emphatic 2019 article from Frontiers in Physiology.

Yes, abolish the clock-changing ritual (which causes a twice-yearly “nationwide jet lag”). But the time settled on should be standard time, in which the sun is highest at or near 12.

Shannon Morgan has drawn my attention to a web page with an interactive map by Andy Woodruff. (His explanation even includes his computer code for generating it.) This map shows that returning to year-round standard time would be “win-win” for everyone in the US. You choose what you feel to be “the latest reasonable sunrise time” and “the earliest reasonable sunset time” (or accept the suggestions given). The map then displays the US divided exactly into three kinds of area: white, those for which the present rule is most satisfactory; blue, those for which it would be better to “reform” to year-round Daylight Saving Time; gold, those for which year-round standard time would give the most convenient result. White and blue are small strips; the gold areas are far largest. Looks to me like about 80 percent, see what you think.

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