Saving Daylight

On Sunday, November 5, Daylight Savings Time officially ends for the year 2017, whereby we must change all of our clocks to remain is sync with our surrounding world.

Time is a great invention -- it keeps everything from happening all at once.

Every spring we adjust our time pieces by adding an hour in the spring and deleting an hour in the fall.

It's called Daylight Savings Time (DST).

Spring forward, fall back, and do a cartwheel on your front lawn. As per our obligation as followers of leaders, it is our responsibility to adjust our clocks, watches and sundials by an hour to remain in sync with the rest of the world.

It all started in 1784, when Benjamin Franklin wrote a whimsical essay titled "Turkey versus Eagle, McCauley is my Beagle" in which he advocated what is today referred to as Daylight Savings Time.

Over the ensuing years, the notion of saving daylight slowly began to catch on with those who would apparently score low on a whimsy-o-meter.

Germany and England first adopted Daylight Saving Time in the spring of 1916, during World War I.

In March of 1918, the U.S. Congress established times zones, which had been used by the railroads and most cities since 1883, and included a conversion to Daylight Saving Time for the remainder of World War I. 

DST proved to be very unpopular in the USA and was repealed in 1919. President Woodrow Wilson vetoed the legislation but Congress overrode the veto. Thus, America returned to normal after the war to end all wars.

In February of 1942, DST was once again reinstated in the USA for World War II. Apparently, it's easier to fight world wars if you adjust the time pieces to save daylight. That way, you have an extra hour each day to fight and the enemy can't sneak away in the dark quite as easily.

In September of 1945, the "war time" requirement of DST was removed.

From 1945 to 1966, the U.S. Congress had better things to do than mess with time. States and localities were free to observe or not to observe DST.

In April of 1966, the Federal Uniform Time Act mandated DST nationwide. However, individual states could become exempt from DST by passing a state law.

Then in 1972, the Act was amended to permit states that straddle time zones (such as Indiana) to exempt areas within zones.

The primary benefit of advancing clocks by an hour in the spring and reversing them in the fall is to give people more afternoon sun during the summer. However, an extra hour of daylight in the afternoon costs an hour of daylight in the morning. While a time change may benefit some, it can be inconvenient or a burden to others.

• Sleep patterns are interrupted which generally take up to five days after each time shift to overcome

• Personal health and work-related productivity suffer with changing sleep patterns

• Those who must rise with the sun (agriculture) are out of sync with the societal time schedules

• Studies show that traffic accidents increase significantly during periods following the time shifts

• Computers must all change their internal clocks in accordance with human time

• Additional afternoon sunlight actually increases energy consumption

• Time shifts cause much confusion with international business

• All Amtrak trains must stop for an hour in the fall to remain in sync with published timetables

• In the spring, Amtrak trains become an hour behind schedule and must do their best to catch up

The state of Arizona does not observe Daylight Saving Time. I lived there in 1987-92 and life was much simpler sticking to a consistent time. I never understood why the rest of the country was so unenlightened. Saving daylight is a lot like saving a jar of air. Basically, it's an exercise in stupidity resulting in an empty jar.

The U.S. Congress, in its infinite wisdom, has given us even more daylight to be saved. Starting in 2007, Daylight Saving Time was extended another four or five weeks in the USA (except Arizona, Hawaii and parts of Indiana), from the second Sunday of March to the first Sunday of November.

Note to Congress: Daylight Saving Time really doesn't save any daylight -- it only causes irritation, much like most everything else you do. If DST is such a great idea, why not do it all year around and avoid the grief?

When confronted with rules made by nitwits, one course of action is to become a nitwit. When the times change in the spring, show up at work an hour late, complaining you didn't realize the change had occurred. In the fall, show up two hours late during the time change, explaining you were confused. It works either way.

Time is precious -- don't give it away so freely. The only freedom you have in this dimension is the time that belongs to you.

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Quote for the Day – "Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted." John Lennon

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Bret Burquest is the author of 12 books. He lives in the Ozark Mountains with a couple of dogs and very few clocks.

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Extreme Longevity of a Human Being

Li Ching-Yuen was born in China in 1677 and died in 1933. His life is the most thoroughly documented case of extreme longevity, spanning 256 years.

Imperial Chinese government records from 1827 report that Li Ching-Yuen was congratulated on his 150th birthday and documents from 1877 report that he was congratulated on his 200th birthday.

According to local folklore, he produced some 180 descendents, comprising 11 generations, and survived 14 wives.

"Beautiful is old age -- beautiful as the slow-dropping mellow autumn of a rich glorious summer. In the old man, Nature has fulfilled her work; she loads him with blessings; she fills him with the fruits of a well-spent life; and, surrounded by his children and his children's children, she rocks him softly away to a grave, to which he is followed with blessings. God forbid we should not call it beautiful." J.A. Froude

Li Ching Yuen was a herbalist, gathering and selling wild ginseng, lingzhi, goitu kola and Goji berry. He maintained a diet of herbs and rice wine. During his early years, Li Ching-Yuen learned methods of longevity and gathered herbs from mountain ranges. At age 71, he joined the Chinese Army as a martial arts instructor.

Goji berries, also called wolfberries, are possibly the most nutritional fruit on Earth. They contain 18 amino acids, including all 8 essential amino acids, and more than 20 trace minerals (such as zinc, calcium, selenium, germanium, iron, phosphorus and many others). By weight, they have 500 times the amount of vitamin C as oranges and also contain vitamins B1, B2, B6 and vitamin E. Of all known plants on Earth, Goji berries are the richest source of carotenoids (including beta-carotene). They also contain polysaccharides, which stimulates secretion of human growth hormones by the pituitary gland and fortify the immune system.

Inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened -- as you get older, work is a lot less fun and fun is a lot more work -- the best course of life is to die young as late as possible.

The first wealth is health -- we are what we eat.

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Quote for the Day – "Be content with what you have. Rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you." Lao Tzu

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Bret Burquest is the author of 12 books. He lives in the Ozark Mountains with a few dogs and an imaginary girlfriend named Tequila Mockingbird.

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Consciousness of Water

There is magic on Planet Earth -- it's called water.

Water is a basic component of all living things on the planet. Two-thirds of the surface of earth is covered by water and the human body is made up of over 70 percent water. It's the essence of our being.

The human race cannot survive more than a few days without fresh water, which is slowly disappearing and will soon become the most precious commodity on earth.

Approximately 97 percent of the earth’s water is salt water, unsuitable for human consumption. Another two percent is frozen in glaciers and ice caps, primarily in Antarctica. The remaining one percent is all that’s available for residential, agricultural, industrial, and community usage, including keeping our cars washed, our public water fountains bubbling and our golf courses green.

Japanese researcher, Dr. Masaru Emoto, has done extensive experiments with water and concluded it has a consciousness. According to Dr. Emoto, water has the capacity to perceive and remember. It also has the capacity to communicate with its environment just like any other living organism.

In 1994, Dr. Emoto began research to measure the properties of water by using Magnetic Resonance Analysis (MRA), a technology used in alternative medicine to measure the ability of the human body to resonate (vibrate) at certain frequencies thereby becoming a natural healing agent.

He collected water samples from many parts of Japan, as well as from other places in the world. Each sample of water was placed in 100 Petri dishes and frozen. Utilizing a photographic microscope (magnifications of 200 to 500 times), photographs were taken a split moment before the frozen ice flakes began to liquefy.

After more than four years of observations and some 10,000 photographs, Dr. Emoto has concluded that "healthy water will show a complete hexagonal crystal structure while the chipping away and/or collapsing of crystal structures are not good signs."

He added that each water crystal seemed to be "trying to purify itself."

Not surprising to most country bumpkins, some of the water samples from urban areas show deformed crystal structures, whereas water from remote rural areas generally appears to have fine crystal structures.

In another experiment, Dr. Emoto placed distilled water between two speakers and played different sounds. Bach and Mozart created good crystal structures while heavy metal music had the opposite effect. In addition, the prayer chanting of monks resulted in superior crystal structures.

Dr. Emoto opined, "Musical vibrations contain positive and negative energies, depending on the information inscribed into them. Water reflects what it perceives."

He is convinced that water is influenced by its surroundings. For example, he placed a glass of water in front of a running computer for four hours and no crystals were produced. When he placed water near a television playing a movie with a positive storyline, good crystals were formed.

"Positive information results in beautiful hexagonal crystals, while negative information shows otherwise," Dr. Emoto observed.

If Dr. Emoto's findings are correct, positive thoughts can affect the quality of water in our own bodies, whereas stress (a cause of many illnesses) may be the result of the negativity (bad energy) we propagate in our body's water.

A positive attitude leads to good bodily vibrations -- a negative attitude wears you down.

“It is chronic water shortage in the body that causes most diseases of the human body." Dr. Emoto

In many places around the world water has become highly polluted. Dr. Emoto hopes to create an awareness of this problem and believes we can improve the quality of water simply by becoming more grateful of it.

This may sound like New Age nonsense but there was a time when it was believed that the world was flat. Then an astronomer named Galileo discovered that the world was round and revolved around the sun. In 1633, he was brought before the Catholic Inquisition, tortured, forced to renounce his heretical views, and imprisoned.

The proliferation of knowledge is a slow process on a planet where greed is good, more is always better and wars are memorialized.

But in actuality, everything in the universe and beyond is a single entity -- it's all connected.

I decided to test some of Dr. Emoto's theories on my own water. I hired a group of chanting monks and had them perform some heavy metal music. As expected, my water crystals became very schizophrenic – they were both delighted (by the chanting monks) and irritated (by the heavy metal music) at the same time.

Then again, I'm often delighted and irritated at the same time too. But I don't think I'm schizophrenic though, and neither does the other guy who lives inside my body. I deal with the outside world while he hides in the lower left quadrant of my cerebral cortex, snickering at me. Although he usually keeps a low profile, he tends to howl during full moons and Madame Blavatsky's birthday. Perhaps this could explain why I live alone in the middle of nowhere and talk mostly to trees.

Life is simple -- happiness is a choice, suffering is optional.

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Quote for the Day – "Purify your thoughts and everything will be well." Mahatma Gandhi

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Bret Burquest is the author of 12 books. He lives in the Ozark Mountains with a few dogs and where fresh water oozes from the ground, called "springs."

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