These days, Mount Vernon Canyon is Denver’s busy gateway to the high-flown and high-priced ski resorts of the high Rockies. Not so many days ago, though, serious schussers trekked that gorgeous gorge to plant their planks on the slippery slopes of – Mount Vernon Canyon.

Long before Vail, before Breckenridge and Beaver Creek, in a simpler age before snow-making machines and quad lifts and time-share condos and the $6 doughnut, there was Genesee Mountain, the 8,284-foot cradle of Colorado’s ski industry.

The year was 1919, and most Front Range ski enthusiasts scratched their alpine itch at Inspiration Point, a modest mound of prairie located at Sheridan Boulevard and West 49^th Avenue offering about 60 feet of vertical dissatisfaction and tantalizing views of plunge-ier prospects to the west. At the time, the term “skiing” was widely understood to mean “ski jumping.” Downhill equipment hadn’t yet progressed much beyond plank-and-lash technology, and while a few earnest types were fooling around with the arcane mysteries of “telemark”, Nordic technique was still hip deep in the age of “French fries” versus “slice of pizza.” Early skiers needed unambiguous point-and-shoot runs offering nowhere else to go but straight down. Ambitious elements of the freshly-minted Denver Winter Sports Club began constructing a loftier kind of inspiration on the north face of Genesee Mountain.

The Genesee Ski Jump opened for business in 1920 to immediate success. Ski clubs from Steamboat Springs, to Hot Sulphur Springs, to Homewood Park in Deer Creek Canyon sent their best to compete against the local set, and they all gathered together in a cozy warming house after a hard day’s jumping to crow about their aerial exploits and enjoy “dainty Norwegian pastry gems.” The Genesee Jump went big-time the following year, hosting the first of seven National Ski Jumping Tournaments to be held atop Mount Vernon Canyon. From 1921 to 1927, the prestigious events drew top-tier talent from across the region and annually attracted up to 10,000 spectators from across the Front Range.

Before bemoaning too deeply the parking lot that forms in Clear Creek Canyon each winter weekend, modern skiers should consider the personal price of a lift-ticket in the 1920s. The very idea of Interstate 70 was purest science fiction back then, and U.S. 40 wasn’t even a glint in a civil engineer’s eye. To reach Genesee Mountain, most skiers drove the harrowing Lookout Mountain Road and endured a back-breaking bump-fest along miles of abandoned wagon road. That probably sounded downright posh to the typical spectator, who would take the trolley from Denver to Golden, ride the funicular to the top of Lookout Mountain, and trudge the remaining distance on foot.

Genesee Mountain boasted four separate ski jumps during its brief-but-brilliant hey-day, the largest measuring some 2,000 feet in length and plummeting 700 vertical feet. Given the region’s mild meteorological profile, fleets of trucks and teams of strong backs were frequently enlisted to haul snow from far afield and shovel it by hand onto the sun-washed mountainside, creating shiny ivory ribbons of winter cascading through grassy meadow. It was the canyon’s cursedly clement climate, along with improved access to snowier slopes in Steamboat Springs and Estes Park, that ultimately doomed the Genesee Jump. All but derelict by the late 1930s, the site caught a brief second wind in the mid-1950s when the University of Denver chose it for a handful of collegiate meets. But academia, too, quickly moved on, and today the once-prominent landmark is largely obscured by encroaching pine forest and upscale condominiums.

And that would have spelled the end to skiing in Mount Vernon Canyon, except that it didn’t.

In 1946, a Dartmouth graduate, 10^th Mountain Division veteran and Denver winter sports promoter named Laurance ‘Larry’ Jump helped launch Arapahoe Basin Ski Area among the gasping peaks just south of Loveland Pass. Fast-forward to 1972 when Jump, perceiving an under-served market of potential skiers who might pick up the habit if they didn’t have to face the rigors of Loveland Pass in winter, launched Arapahoe East Ski Area on the south wall of Mount Vernon Canyon just a couple of miles down-stream from the area’s original Jump.

The effort started strong, serving about 600 feet of vertical drop serviced via one double chair lift, a Poma lift and a rope tow. The half-dozen anchor runs bottomed out at 6,800 feet where Arapahoe East’s modest, but modern, ski lodge offered hot food, equipment rentals and ski lessons. Modeling the venture on successful suburban ski areas of the Midwest, and hoping to capture the interest of “casual” day-skiers, Jump introduced Colorado to “shift” pricing, single-ride lift tokens, night skiing, and the new and novel notion of “ski-bobbing.”

Of course, no more snow fell on Arapahoe East’s 7,400-foot “Top One” than fell on the Genesee Mountain Jump, and not even the modern magic of manufactured snow could rescue the low-flung folly from temperate oblivion. But that’s not to say that Laurance ‘Larry’ Jump gave up without a fight. Taking heat from his partners at Arapahoe Basin, he promoted the concept of “grass skiing”, which never took off, and in 1976 he applied for an alpine slide permit, which was never granted. In a desperate bid at re-branding, in 1982 the area was re-named “Ski Golden” and closed for good two years later when the Colorado Tramway Board cited the operation for numerous violations including a thoroughly demoralized staff found drinking on the job.

While Genesee Park remains a popular antidote to the daily frets and fidgets of civilization, there’s virtually nothing left of the celebrated Jump that helped put Colorado on the nation’s ski map. The rusting lift towers of Arapahoe East would stand still and silent until 1996, when they were pulled down to make room for nothing at all. Although the area’s access road is still plainly visible, it takes a sharp eye to trace the course of the “Top Two” trails that still fall through the trees from the ridgeline above.

If skiers on their way to Pitkin County glitz, Eagle County glamour and the elegant resorts of Summit and Grand rarely spare a thought for Jefferson County’s precipitous landscapes, it’s because those too-familiar hillsides offer precious little to remind them of the not-so-long-ago days when both gateway and destination were in Mount Vernon Canyon.

Look! Up in the sky!

It’s not a bird, but it might be getting ready to lay an egg. It’s not really a plane, although it’s sure got the Federal Aviation Administration’s attention. It’s an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), if you like, or an unmanned aircraft system (UAS) if you like that better. You probably know it as a drone, and it’s taking Metropolises everywhere by swarm.

The first consumer drone, the semi-venerable Parrot AR quadcopter, was launched at a Las Vegas tech show back in 2010. By 2014, industry watchers estimated some 350,000 consumer drones hangared in American garages. Christmas 2015 saw about a million more sold between LGA and LAX, and by New Year’s Day, 2017, experts expect the country’s remote-control civil fleet will soar to at least 2.5 million.

That’s a lot of unregulated aviation, which is why in 2014 the FAA began requiring drone owners to register as such. To date, about 325,000 actually have, which still leaves a lot of unregulated aviation.

Granted, most consumer drones aren’t big enough to do any serious damage. Models ranging from $99 starters to $6,500 professional-grade units can tip the scales anywhere between MOTA’s half-ounce JETJAT Nano and DJI’s burly 22-pound Spreading Wings S1000 Octocopter. Consumer drones don’t have to be big because their primary function is photographic, and cameras – even high-speed, hi-res video platforms on stabilizing gimbals – are getting smaller all the time. Still, there have been, er, incidents.

Two years ago a Dutch tourist crashed his eye-in-the-sky into Yellowstone’s fragile Grand Prismatic Spring. That same year an Australian triathlete ended up with stitches in her scalp and a disappointing time after a drone following the race fell to Earth directly on top off her noggin. Intending to catch lovers in mid-lip-lock, a TGI Friday’s holiday promotion called “Mobile Mistletoe” left a bad taste in participants’ mouths when an extra-extreme closeup cost a woman named Georgine Benvenuto the tip of her nose. And several people attending an event at Virginia Motorsports Park in Richmond were injured when a hobbyist’s UAV made an unscheduled landing in the stands.

While undoubtedly sympathetic toward terrestrial victims, the FAA is mostly uptight about UAVs in the airways. Sucked into a jet engine, that half-pound My-First-Drone under the Christmas tree could present a not-very-jolly holiday surprise for a plane-load of folks on their way back from grandmother’s house. In 2015, commercial pilots reported well over a thousand too-close encounters with recreational flying objects, a rate of more than three per day.

Just 26 states have acted to put the airbrakes on drone traffic, and then with almost monkish self-restraint. In Colorado, several attempts to legislatively sanitize sensitive airspace have all gone down in flames, burned to a crisp by concentrated heat from what this year became a $5.5 billion industry dominated by the Great Big Chinese manufacturer DJI.

Police departments and customs officials love drones. Farmers and ranchers love drones. Geologists, ecologists and archaeologists love drones. Drones are great for search and rescue, public and private security, mapping and surveying, and for the general monitoring of just about anything under the clear blue sky. Hollywood has gone positively drone-crazy. Collectively, however, that’s all small potatoes compared to the real prize – drone delivery.

For most of its short life, the backyard buzz-bot has been severely limited by range, tethered to its operator by a short radio leash. With the decreasing price and increasing reliability of GPS guidance systems, “autonomous” commercial units are expanding the boundaries of self-guided freight-hauling into profitable territory.

America’s first-ever drone delivery was made in March of 2015 when an Australian outfit called Flirtey teamed up with Virginia Tech and NASA to deliver 10 pounds of medical supplies from a rural Virginia airfield to a clinic about three miles away.

Eighteen months later, autonomous UAVs are poised to haul 50-pound payloads up to 15 miles, and some very heavy retail hitters are racing to be the first to get their goods in the air. Amazon, Google X and Walmart are all testing drone delivery systems, and since the FAA finally overcame its UAV anxiety long enough to formalize UAS operational rules a few weeks ago, Millennials should at last realize their fondest dream of using their smartphones to obtain everything from groceries to garments, electronics to auto parts and medicines to Montrachet without ever once having to interface directly with a tiresome human being.

Not surprisingly, first into the breach have been food and beverage entrepreneurs. In San Francisco, the “Tacocopter” is good for a crunchy lunch anywhere in the city. In Minnesota, ice fishermen have been known to get a 12-pack of Lakemaid Beer air-dropped hole-side. Guest to the Casa Madrona Hotel in Sausalito can get champagne droned to their rooms, and the Marquee Dayclub in Las Vegas vends over-priced bottles of stronger stuff the same way. London-based YO! Sushi has been sending “sushi burgers” on the wing, and Coca Cola has been air-lifting ice-cold comfort and notes from home to migrant construction workers stuck for weeks at a time atop rising Singapore skyscrapers.

A couple of California dreamers have completed beta testing the “Burrito Bomber.” Customers place their order via a special smartphone app. A custom-made refried wrap is loaded into a high-tech “Burrito Delivery Tube” affixed to the bottom of a Skywalker X8 Flying Wing. Upon reaching the specified coordinates, the Burrito Bomber engages a Quantum RTR Bomb System which releases the payload in mid-air, automatically deploying a parachute that allows the high-flying feast to descend gently into the hands of the hungry.

“We’ll be able to take to the skies to bring you your burrito faster than you can say ‘Salsa roja, por favor!’” declare a source close to the project.

It’s hard to see how that kind of Yankee Doodle ingenuity can miss. FAA analysts predict that innovation, imagination and rapidly advancing technologies will make drones a $90 billion business within the next 10 years.

Truth and justice aside, that’s definitely the American Way.

“I think in terms of the day’s resolutions, not the year’s.”   Henry Moore

Here it is, the middle of January, and already you see them everywhere.

They blanket the trails of Elk Meadow like confetti in Times Square. They rise in heaps and piles beneath bar stools all over town. Busy confectioneries have all but disappeared behind deep drifts of them. They are the desiccating carcasses of that most ephemeral species of human endeavor, the New Year’s resolution, and the best that can be said of this seasonal slaughter is that it’s entirely predictable.

About 45 percent of Americans make New Year’s resolutions on a regular basis. About 25 percent of those confident pledges won’t live to see Valentine’s Day, and another 30 percent will perish from neglect by the Fourth of July. According to several persistent pollsters, in fact, just 8 percent of all New Year’s resolutions survive a full calendar year, a revealing statistic suggesting that the essential element missing from most resolutions is actual resolve.

Orbit after orbit, Americans’ top three New Year’s resolutions in order of popularity are 1.) Lose Weight, 2.) Get Fit, and 3.) Live Life to the Fullest, the second runner-up having the advantage of being subject to easy re-interpretation on the fly. Other perennial favorites include Get Organized, Spend Less, Drink Less, Travel More, Get a New Job, Spend More Time with Family and Fall in Love.

Those are all excellent aspirations deserving of best effort. So why don’t 92 percent of them get it? As always, a contemplative coterie of academics has pondered that very question and identified a few of the fundamental flaws that each year keep something like 150 million Americans from meeting their better selves. Behold now their accumulated wisdom and resolution-ary strategies for responsible personal improvement.

Nanny No-No

Most people choose for their New Year’s Resolutions things they feel they “should” do, rather than things they actually want to do. Sigh. If your heart’s not really in it you’re halfway to hopeless right out of the gate, which is why experts recommend confining yourself to goals already endowed with a healthy supply of personal motivation. There’s a world of difference between pinching pennies because your financial advisor told you to and being careful about spending because you’re tired of eating process cheese sandwiches for breakfast, lunch and dinner, or because you’d look really, really cool on a brand-new motorcycle and/or the beach at Punta Mita.

Let’s Be Clear

“I’m gonna get in shape!” is a great idea and a lousy resolution. There are a hundred different ways to trim down and tone up, leaving you way too much discretion as to method, timetable and result. Will you jog? Swim? Hike? And how often? How far? How exactly will you know when you’re finally “in shape”? With so much wiggle room to work with, most people will quickly wiggle out of their commitment altogether, making specificity a key ingredient in the formulation of sensible resolutions. “I’ll jog two miles a day for three days a week until I’ve lost five pounds” boxes you in, which is exactly why it has a fighting chance to succeed. Psychologists advise choosing goals that lend themselves to rigorous scheduling and measurement, and then applying plenty of both.

Reality Check

Cold-turkey is for turkeys, and a critical failing of many resolutions is obvious over-reach. Instead of resolving to complete your first marathon by June, pledge first to get through the Fourth of July 5K Freedom Run without throwing up. Foreswear sweets across the board and you’ll just end up face-down in the quart of Rocky Road you’ve taken to stashing behind the frozen peas. A more reasonable approach might be to exchange diet cola for the full-strength kind, or maybe stop sugaring your Lucky Charms. You’re not the pillar of self-discipline you think you are, so don’t bite off more than you can chew.

One to a Customer

For those of you who’ve resolved not to be bored by long-winded scientific explanations in 2017, suffice it to say that neural scientists have determined that your odds of achieving a given New Year’s resolution decrease in direct proportion to the number of resolutions you make. The way the eggheads tell it, even a milk-run resolution requires will-power, and even a small expenditure of will-power consumes an enormous amount of mental energy. The term “cognitive fatigue” is just a six-bit way of saying that the more resolutions you’re burning brain-time on, the less will-power you can apply to any one of them and the more certain will be your abject defeat on all fronts. For best results, pick one and done.

Share the Load

Whether you’re swearing off carbohydrates or social media, self-improvement is a heavy burden to bear alone. Tell your family. Tell your friends. Tell your co-workers. Tell the kid who shovels your driveway. By making sure lots of people know about your brave resolution, you’ll not only ensure priceless moral and emotional support, but you’ll pretty much guarantee immediate contempt and ridicule when you try to weasel out of it. There’s nothing quite so motivating as the fear of public shame.

Mixed Messages

We are all of us frail creatures, and a little back-sliding is built into our DNA. That you missed a scheduled hour on the treadmill is no good reason to throw up your hands and sink back into your original program of overindulgence and sloth. If you’re bent on a positive change genuinely desired, don’t get sidetracked by the occasional lapse. On the other hand – and the experts are quite adamant on this point – there is no statistical rationale for attempting a failed resolution a second time. If you couldn’t read a book a week in 2016, there’s no good reason to think you’ll be able to do it in 2017. Accept defeat gracefully and move on to one of your countless other character deficiencies in desperate need of remediation.

“Be at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbors, and let every new year find you a better man.”   Benjamin Franklin

“There is a remarkable breakdown of taste and intelligence at Christmastime. Mature, responsible grown men wear neckties made out of holly leaves and drink alcoholic beverages with egg yolks and cottage cheese in them.”      P.J. O’Rourke

A weird thing about people is that they’re always looking for an excuse to be weirder.

Take Christmas. You’d think that love, joy and Peace on Earth would be enough to sustain any holiday. But it’s not. It never was. People moved quickly from Wise Men and angels-we-have-heard-on-high to fruitcake, over-sized stockings and a chimney-spelunking philanthropist towed around by a flying caribou with a thousand-watt honker.

Weird.

From there it was a distressingly short trip to Santa Shrek lawn ornaments, musical footwear, “Home Alone 3”, gelatin salad with crushed candy canes in it, White Elephant parties and Black Friday.

Weirder.

Fortunately, most of those strange symptoms of the season can be avoided by the prudent, or at least dismissed by the patient. Not so the Ugly Christmas Sweater. A relative newcomer to modern merrymaking, the retina-searing regalia of the hyper-festive simply won’t be denied. At work, at the grocery store, on a public sidewalk, an Ugly Christmas Sweater will march right up and explode in your face without warning. Whether you love it, or hate it, or love it and hate it, that ubiquitous Yuletide uniform is now as much a part of the holidays as the Grinch and green bean casserole.

So how exactly did we get from Bethlehem to Tacky Town? Happily, it’s not a long narrative journey, although it may be hard for some to hear. Folks who profess to know describe the Ugly Christmas Sweater as an inharmonic convergence of two roughly parallel trends that came of age in the fashion- free 1980s, the same decade that brought you leg warmers, sweatbands and acid-washed jeans.

‘Twas the advent of the Christmas Variety Special that set the stage, with white-bread crooners like Andy Williams gathered around a TV hearth purring semi-swinging carols and sporting what were then known as a “Jingle Bell Sweaters”, relatively tame garments of generally Scandinavian artistic derivation. Enter actor and comedian Bill Cosby who, as Cliff Huxtable on the hit sitcom “The Cosby Show”, popularized the wearing of hideous sweaters. The combination of nostalgic themes and stylistic carte blanche proved irresistible, and the Ugly Christmas Sweater quickly rose to dominate year-end ensembles all across a nog-addled nation.

Alas, what goes up must come down, and by the early 1990s the Ugly Christmas Sweater found itself relegated to the retail rag-bin of “gag gifts”, rejected by most in favor of more tasteful holiday attire. There it would languish until well into the New Millenium when it was re-discovered by satire-starved hipsters who found in its trite themes and deliberate démodé to be an oh-so-ironic alternative to flattering apparel. The Ugly Christmas Sweater has been on a sarcastic sleigh ride to the stars ever since, with retail sales of the item increasing as much as 500 percent every year since 2010.

Ugly Christmas Sweater Parties are all the rage, these days. Although a precise genesis may never be known, “The Ugly Christmas Sweater Party Book: The Definitive Guide to Getting Your Ugly On” suggests that the first such unsightly soiree might have been thrown in 2002 by Canadian mock-hounds Chris Boyd and Jordan Birch in Vancouver’s classy Commodore Ballroom. Badly dressed Canooks still rock the Commodore each Christmas, with up to 1,000 paying guests competing to out-kitsch the disco balls.

Should you have occasion to attend an Ugly Christmas Sweater Party but can find nothing suitably unappealing in your wardrobe, commerce is way ahead of you. Although their rich lodes of cast-away Christmas cardigans have been worked for years, thrift shops and resale outlets are still good source of nerdy knitwear. Websites like ButtUglySweaters.com, TipsyElves.com and MyUglyChristmasSweater.com offer a plethora of preposterous pullovers to choose from, and well-heeled hipsters can satisfy their sardonic impulses via high-end haberdashers like Burberry, which will gladly accept up to $600 for a sweater no self-respecting Millennial would be seen wearing on Jan. 2 for any money. Then again, there’s just no substitute for the handmade holiday habit, and the Internet is tailor-made for the bad dresser on a budget. UglyChristmasSweaters.com, for example, is a handy source of information for those wishing to craft their own brand of unbecoming.

So what makes an Ugly Christmas Sweater ugly? More is more. More cheesy imagery, more contrasting colors, more ribbons and bows, more bangles and baubles, gimcracks and gingerbread. You can’t really put too many bells and whistles on an Ugly Christmas Sweater, both bells and whistles being perfectly acceptable embellishments. There’s even a website that details how to create a sweater displaying a full-color, live-action cheery Christmas fire like the one Jimmy Fallon wore on TV using only scraps of fabric, an iPad and entirely too much free time.

Yes, Americans do a lot of bizarre things in the name of Christmas, but it’s not like we have a monopoly on that market. Venezuelans travel to Christmas Mass on roller skates. Ukrainians decorate their Christmas trees with spider webs. Many in South African celebrate with a feast of deep-fried caterpillars, and Japanese spend Christmas Day working through a big tub of Kentucky Fried Chicken.

Still, when you think of millions of otherwise rational Americans honoring one of the most important days of the Christian calendar, not to mention the Western World’s most beloved holiday, by expending countless hours, gobs of money and enormous effort on garments quite consciously intended to offend the  sensibilities, well…

That’s just weird.

“Christmas sweaters are only acceptable as a cry for help.”     Andy Borowitz

“Only the government would believe you can cut a foot off the bottom of a blanket, sew it onto the top of the blanket, and have a longer blanket.”     Anonymous

It almost sounds fun.

“Spring forward, Fall back.”

Short, clever, catchy.

But it’s not fun. It’s annoying and confusing, a bi-annual irritation imposed on a complacent people by faceless bureaucrats and over-reaching pencil-pushers presuming to regulate the fourth dimension for reasons never made entirely clear.

At present, daylight saving time – or “summer time” as  it’s more casually known – in the United States and Canada begins on the second Sunday in March and runs through the first Sunday in November, which begs the question why the remaining one-third of the calendar gets to be called “standard” time. Semantics aside, DST has been a seasonal – and until recently only occasional – fact of American life for the better part of a century. Then again, the modern impulse to micromanage Nature is not so surprising when one considers that Mankind has been sticking it to Chronos almost since the beginning of…er…time.

The first solid evidence of time standardization dates to about 2,000 BC when the Sumerians invented the sundial and instituted the 12-hour day. Thing was, as the days grew longer, the practical-minded Sumerians simply let the hours grow with them, an admirably flexible time-keeping system that left the description of sunlight hours to the…um…Sun.

“Daylight time, a monstrosity in timekeeping.”     Harry S. Truman

About 4,000 years later, a New Zealander named George Hudson decided we could go the timeless majesty of celestial mechanics one better. Hudson was an amateur entomologist with a day job who spent evenings rooting about the North Island landscape for interesting bugs to classify. In 1895 he presented a paper to the Wellington Philosophical Society advocating a seasonal two-hour shift.

George Hudson

Although Hudson’s bold proposal never made it out of committee, the notion was picked up in 1905 by Englishman and avid golfer William Willett, who abhorred the sight of able-bodied Londoners unproductively idling in bed on sunny summer mornings almost as much as he hated having his 18 holes interrupted by thoughtless dusk. Willett was a man of some stature within the Empire and in 1908 managed to get a Daylight Saving Bill before the assembled House of Commons. While the bill never found sufficient Parliamentary support to become law, its principles found favor elsewhere within the Empire. In 1911, the mayor of Orillia, Ontario, one William Sword Frost, adopted daylight saving time within the borders of that fair city. When Frost left office in 1912, DST left with him.

War saved daylight saving time. Imperial Germany and its ally, Austria-Hungary, instituted the practice during the Great War in hopes of saving coal, and the Allied Nations soon followed suit. Winston Churchill was a staunch DST promoter during the Second World War, arguing that it enlarged “opportunities for the pursuit of health and happiness.” Detractors argued it was a bloody nuisance.

“An extra yawn one morning in the springtime, an extra snooze one night in the autumn is all that we ask in return for dazzling gifts. We borrow an hour one night in April; we pay it back with golden interest five months later.”     Winston Churchill

These days, countries from Sweden to Samoa and from the Netherlands to Namibia change their clocks twice a year. For what it’s worth, more countries don’t practice daylight saving than do, and many others – including China and Russia – gave it a test drive and then gave it up as not worth the hassles. Thanks to their relatively stable solar environment, very few people living between the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn has ever been told to Spring or Fall anywhere.

America’s experience with time-tampering affords many excellent examples of the hassles that can happen when the thinking classes are allowed to complicate the simple. Officially established on these shores in 1918 as a wartime measure to conserve resources, daylight saving time was quickly abandoned when peace broke out later that same year and public enthusiasm for clock-resetting dimmed – except in New York City, which retained daylight saving so Wall Street could more easily stay in synch with European markets, and in Chicago and Cleveland which kept the practice to stay in synch with New York City.

Following a short second national act during World War II, the concept was firmly tabled from coast to coast until the 1970s when meddling economists proposed that DST might in some way alleviate the energy crisis. Arizona and Michigan formally opted out of the program, and then Michigan opted back in. Indiana, which has knowingly and with malice aforethought apportioned itself into two different time zones, bounced in and out of daylight saving on a county-by-county basis until the state legislature made DST the law of that still-divided land in 2005. And, for awhile there, Minneapolis and St. Paul were separated by both one river and one hour. Long scheduled from the first Sunday in April until the last Sunday in October, daylight saving’s current dimensions were established by act of Congress in 2007, a tweak purported to reduce dependence on incandescent lighting and strongly supported by proto-helicopter-parents demanding an “extra hour of daylight” on Halloween.

“I don’t really care how time is reckoned so long as there is some agreement about it, but I object to being told that I am saving daylight when my reason tells me that I am doing nothing of the kind.”      Robertson Davies

In general, agriculture doesn’t like DST. In general, industry does. Environmentalists and energy watchdogs maintain that daylight saving time conserves energy and reduces carbon emissions, but numerous public and private studies have failed to persuasively quantify any such benefits. Many DST proponents insist that clock-changing saves lives by giving commuters an extra hour of daylight driving. Interestingly, one governmental study found that while there does seem to be a very slight dip in traffic fatalities over the course of DST, there is a significant increase in car crashes in the two weeks immediately following its annual implementation that experts ascribe to fatigue resulting from disrupted sleep patterns.

Biologically, more time in the sunshine means more nourishing vitamin D. It also means a higher risk of skin cancer. Some research suggests that rising earlier eases depression. Other research suggests that going to bed earlier makes depression worse. A whole bunch of research finds as much as a 10 percent increase in heart attacks during the three weeks following a time change.

Humans are an adaptable species, thank goodness, and being made to Spring and Fall every year of our nasty, brutish and short lives is a small price to pay in return for conquering the darkness and triumphing over time itself.

Unless we’re not.

“You will never find anybody who can give you a clear and compelling reason why we observe Daylight Saving Time.”     Dave Barry