I am the Andy Rooney of the blogosphere
Written at: 01:11 25 Jun, 2007 permalink
You know what's stupid? In our so-called "time system", 11:40pm comes after 12:30pm. Think about it. Gah!
I was looking at the itinerary for our trip to Australia and it took me several moments to work out how it is that we fly out of Portland (to LA) at 12:30pm, yet fly out of LA at 11:40pm. What kind of sick mind came up with that bright idea?
Probably the same sick mind that set up our itinerary so that we spend nine of the first twelve hours of our trip in LAX, lovely LAX. (Okay, there are extenuating circumstances to why our itinerary is so foul — including an even more cruel fourteen-hour LAX layover on the way home — but if I mentioned those, you wouldn't feel as sorry for me. And pity is one of this blog's driving forces, behind ego. Well behind ego.)
But enough about me. Back to my rantings on chronology.
So the aforementioned problem stems from the fact that, even after we've crossed the meridian — that is, noon, the "m" in your "am" and "pm" — we still continue to count up using the ante meridiem (before the meridian) numbers. Oddly, we reset the count an hour after crossing the meridian, and then only starting at 1, not 0.
It sounds stupid when I actually write it out like this — is the problem that no one actually bothered to do this when they came up with this system? Did they just talk a bit and then figure everything else would fall in place:
Mr. Kronos: Hey, let's invent a time system! I'm tired of having everything occur all at once!
Mrs. Kronos: Yeah, good idea! Let's break the day up into hours ... I don't know, how about twelve of them?
Mr. Kronos: Twelve? I don't know ... I was kind of hoping for more, so I could get more done in the day. Maybe twenty or more?
Mrs. Kronos: Well, okay, but I already made this clock face, and it only has twelve hours on it.
Mr. Kronos: Oh, that's alright, we'll just say that you have to go through twelve hours twice every day. So the day will start at 1 on the clock and ...
Mrs. Kronos: Um, about that ... I put 12 at the top of my clock face. Can we have it start at twelve instead?
Mr. Kronos: Hmm ... I guess. But people are going to be confused by that 12–1 jump, so let's put it at some time of day when no one will notice, in the middle of the night. Well, okay, not the exact middle ... a little closer to the beginning, really.
Mrs. Kronos: Yes, no one will be awake then to notice. And that works out, too, because when the clock strikes twelve in the daytime, it will alert people to the fact that the day is half over!
Ah, those wacky Greek plays! They have so much to teach us. Anyhow, I think you see my point: our whole time system is stupid.
I mean, who starts a day at an hour when many people are still awake from the previous day, as it were? Why not start the day, oh, I don't know, when the sun that gives rise to our very concept of "day" comes up in the morning?
If that were the only thing wrong with our measuring of time ... well, I still would have had enough fodder for this blog entry. And yet, because there is so much more that is deeply wrong with our time-counting, I have more.
For instance! We group our days into weeks and, because we are not puritanical all-work-and-no-play types, give that week a proper two-day end. All well and good. Except that the week starts in the middle of the weekend.
Weekend people! Week. End. Guess what starts after the week ends? That's right, the next week. Oh, except in our system, where the next week starts in the middle of the previous week's end. Yeah, think about that sentence for a bit. Before your head explodes, that is!
Oh, but that's not all! We break up our years into seasons. And sure, almost everyone agrees that the seasons start before they officially start. Who waits until June 21st to celebrate summer or December 21st to welcome winter?
But in keeping with the theme of "time units that start when you least expect them to", our new year starts well over a week after winter officially begins, and several weeks after winter-like weather has settled in. Why not start the new year when spring — hello? the season of renewal and new beginnings? — begins? Because that would make sense, that's why.
While I'm at it, whoever came up with these time units and their beginnings was also probably responsible for the whole Western Hemisphere debacle.
Oh, you're not aware of any such debacle? Have you ever looked at a picture of the Western Hemisphere? Sure, it's got North and South America like you'd expect. And also almost all of Britain and Spain.
So the "Western Hemisphere", which is usually used as shorthand for "the Americas and Europe", actually includes all of the former and an arbitrarily small chunk of the latter. Let's face it — the people of yore just didn't know how to divide things up well. Prime meridian, my foot!
But honestly, I'm just grumpy about the long layovers. Sorry.
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