Saving Daylight

It’s that time again, in the U.S. anyway–Daylight Savings Time ends tomorrow. It’s a nuisance, but at least this time, we get to turn the clock back and get an extra hour of sleep. The real killer is in the spring when the clock moves forward, and we celebrate by having lots of traffic accidents.
While pondering this problem recently, I came up with an ingenious plan to fix the system.
In November, nothing changes. But in March, the ‘spring forward’ will be eliminated. Instead, everyone will simply set the clock back twenty-three hours.
So, when we reach 2 a.m. on Sunday, the whatevereth of March, it instantly becomes 3 a.m. on the preceding Saturday. This accomplishes the ‘light savings’ just as well as the current system, and also gives you a do-over for that Saturday, making it a three-day holiday weekend. Or you can choose to stay in bed and sleep your way back to Sunday.
Difficult people might point out that this would create a problem over time, as we’d gain a day and every year would become, in effect, a leap year, pushing the calendar out of synch with actual solar alignments. Not to worry. We simply decree that February now will have only 27 days, and 28 in a leap year. What’s the downside of trading a day in February for an extra day in March? We’ll just have to tweak the famous rhyme a bit, which should be no problem:
Thirty days hath September,
April, June and November,
All the rest have thirty-one,
Excepting February alone–
In leap years keeping twenty-eight,
Else twenty-seven–saves a date!

Any day now, I expect to receive the accolades of a grateful nation..

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