Set Your Clocks Back Saturday Night

If you've been complaining about needing to catch a few more minutes of shut-eye lately, Saturday night will be your chance because daylight saving time ends Sunday at 2 a.m.

At that moment the time will shift to 1 a.m., and although most people don't set an alarm and get up in the middle of the night to change their clocks, there is a reason it happens when typically most are sleeping. It provides the least disruption to travel, school, social, church and work schedules. It's also early enough that the whole country will be on the new time by the time everyone wakes up in the morning.

Some St. Louis bars and clubs will benefit because that gives them an extra hour to stay open. For those nurses and others working the graveyard shift, let's hope you don't end up working an extra hour.

A bit of history
In the United States, the law enacting daylight saving time passed in 1918. It was repealed in 1919 and reinstituted in 1942 during World War II. It was at that time that it got the name "war time." It was left up to each individual state to take it or leave it from 1945 to 1966, and was thrown into bitter debate about standardization in the 1960s.

Why should you care?
The sun will begin to set an hour earlier on Sunday evening. Daylight saving time also means it's time to set all your analog clocks, those that don't magically change on their own like cellphones do, back an hour before heading off to bed. This is also a good time to replace the batteries in your smoke detectors, according to the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. Replacing batteries twice a year is recommended to ensure that smoke detectors are working properly.

Daylight saving time will resume again on March 11, 2012. But in the meantime, people generally like "falling back" because that means they no longer have to send kids off to school in the dark.

Complexities
According to Web Exhibits, DST can cause a switch birth order and create legal loopholes. The site states that a man born just after midnight on daylight saving time, circumvented the Vietnam War draft by using a daylight saving time loophole. When drafted, he argued that standard time, not daylight saving time, was the official time for recording births in his state of Delaware in the year of his birth, the website states. Under official standard time, he was actually born on the previous day, and that day had a much higher draft lottery number, allowing him to avoid the draft.

The site also discusses a California case in which a Chevrolet Blazer packed with teenagers struck the median of a street and flipped over, tragically killing one teen and injuring several others. The teen driver, who was fighting charges of felony vehicular manslaughter, was able to claim that daylight saving time caused the street to be dangerously wet and unsafe because the computerized sprinklers were set to come on more than fifteen minutes after the fatal accident.

So, that may be more information than you care to know about daylight saving time, but tell us, how do you plan to spend your extra hour after you "fall back?"