And then I wrote...

by Dick Schilling, Editor Emeritus

... that I was annoyed, as usual, by the arrival of “God’s” time, at the end of daylight saving time, the first Sunday of November. Mostly because I had to set back the seven or so time pieces in the house and car.
Not that it makes much difference in the way I live.
As I have noted here before, my circadian rhythm, that is, the way things occur over a 24-hour period, is pretty much set after 17 years of retirement. About the only difference is when I arise in the morning, between 6:30 and 7 a.m., I don’t have to turn on the upstairs stairway light for safety’s sake, as I did for a few weeks in late October. And instead of some period of daylight after I bus the table following my evening meal, it is now suddenly dark.
I was told that the idea of DST came during the Second World War, and was designed to save electricity. Does that make sense? I had to use lights for perhaps an hour in the morning under DST, but now lights are needed for several hours in the evening, even with my same approximate early bedtime.
Once upon a time, we observed DST for seven months, from the first Sunday of April to the last Sunday of October. Now, it starts the first Sunday of March and lasts until the first Sunday of November, or about seven weeks longer.
I recall the plaint of dairy farmers, who said their cows don’t carry time pieces and still keep the same hours.
Speaking of energy, I happened to be track side in Lansing when a northbound freight train went past recently. The train was very, very long, and made up almost exclusively of oil tank cars
I had read that the number of oil tank cars was down because operations in the Dakota oil fields have been severely reduced due to low oil prices in the world-wide market.
But on the same page in a recent edition of Big River magazine, a class publication covering the Upper Mississippi, one article notes oil train traffic upstream in Minnesota more than doubled this past summer. The other article says the drop in cars from 2014 to 2015 is more than a third, and the number of cars carrying fracking sand has reached zero.
What’s a guy to believe? I believe my eyes, and those northbound cars were not heading north for no reason, I suspect.
Do you suspect, as I do, that the regional and national media are hyping national elections for their own purposes? Pages after pages are being devoted to what which candidates said what about something and where, and it’s three months to the first caucus and primary tests.
And the unprofessional performances by the liberal CNBC attack dogs in that televised debate had to be a ploy to attract readers through creation of controversy.
Let’s you and him fight?