Saving Daylight

photo courtesy of http://kidsandfamilyproducts.com

Ahhh, this is my favorite morning of the whole year: the boys are awake at 5:30 because their internal clocks don't reset overnight, it'll be dark when I get out of work today, and we're all headed for a sound case of Seasonal Affective Disorder!  Can you hear my sarcasm?  It makes me wonder who ever thought 'daylight savings' was such a great idea in the first place.

I tried to research that a little bit. . . I admit, it wasn't important enough for real solid research, but some cursory web-surfing was in order.  I found it difficult to determine exactly who came up with the idea first.  There were several founding-father types suggested along with several long-obsolete reasons for doing it: Ben Franklin suggests saving whale oil in the street lamps, a meddling brit wants to prevent his neighbors from sleeping away useful daylight hours, but my favorite is the next one.  Wikipedia gives the true credit to an entomologist from New Zealand:


"Modern DST was first proposed by the New Zealand entomologist George Vernon Hudson, whose shift-work job gave him leisure time to collect insects, and led him to value after-hours daylight." 


Does this seem strange to anyone else?  A bug-collector needs light after work to seek out his critters and the whole world changes their clocks to accommodate?  


Oh well.  I guess it's not as bad as I make it out to be.  But, I do wonder why we quit saving daylight in the winter when it is the scarcest.