We had to “spring forward” the morning of Sunday, March 10. I’d forgotten all about it when the Washington Post reminded me with a story about how Mexico has stopped doing daylight savings. I didn’t know Mexico had daylight savings; it’s south of us. So why would it? But it turns out that Mexico was doing it until just recently.
As I recall, Washington voters approved an initiative to do away with standard time altogether and have daylight time the year round, as soon as Congress gave us their okie dokie.
That’s not how I wanted it. I’m a traditional kind of guy. I am made of Stone Age stuff in this regard. I want to be able to use the clock time to tell me where to expect the sun to be. I don’t think the clock time should tell the sun where it’s supposed to pretend to be. I am against fancy, newfangled ways of doing things, like setting clocks by anything other than how high the sun gets in the sky. It’s bad enough we have time zones at all.
It’s not necessary, now that we have computers. The same computers that spring forward and fall backward automatically can just tell us our local time based on our longitude. Do I have to explain everything? You’ve got a smartphone; what time does your genius phone say it is on your block?
Speaking of newfangled ways, the College Board — the people who bring us the SAT tests — have changed said tests so they are shorter and digital; the readings are shorter, and students will be allowed to use an online graphing calculator on the math part. In my day, we used pencils. We weren’t even allowed to use a slide rule. I blame Matt Damon for this — growing potatoes on Mars… really?
Meanwhile, the TSA is experimenting with self-service security checks at the Harry Reid International Airport in Las Vegas. You walk through a new kind of detector that can spot handkerchiefs in your pockets. You don’t have to take your shoes off, and the TSA employees are just there in case an alarm goes off. They say no TSA employees will be laid off because of the new tech, so I guess they will still be busy confiscating nail clippers, bottles of shampoo and snakes in people’s pants.There won’t be a self-service equivalent for pat-downs, unless, I suppose, you specifically request them.
On my way back to the U.S. from Zurich in 1979, I was made to strip down to my underwear at the Zurich airport just because the magic wand wouldn’t stop beeping. They couldn’t ever find the metal on me that was supposedly setting the detector off — they just gave up. I thought of telling them where to look but decided it would have been coarse of me and that the humor wouldn’t have been appreciated. Sometimes you ought to self-censor, is what I say.
Years later, there were reports that makers of magic wands delivered them set to go off at low thresholds, so security would think they were doing their jobs well.
If they had found metal on me, it would have belonged to a metal plate in my head left over from some childhood surgery. Or maybe one of the two times my ribs were broken; metal pins were used to set them back into place.
I suppose I should talk about the impending closure this year of the DESC’s Navigation Center at 12th Avenue South and South Weller Street. As a homeless advocate, I should know more about the Navigation Center than I do, but honestly I have gaps in my experience sometimes. I never could understand why the Navigation Center was preferable to many new shelters. It seemed to me that it invited problems by concentrating people in need of new shelter in one place. That and it is also two blocks from ground zero in the Seattle drug war: 12th Avenue South and South Jackson Street. It wasn’t that the people who were going to be clients of the Navigation Center were especially prone to illegal drug use but that there would always be drug dealers two blocks away. How could the community tell who was who?
Why doesn’t Laurelhurst have a shelter? When I drove a cab in the ’80s, half of all my trips out of there were to 12th and Jackson. If shelters are for drug users, why don’t kids in Laurelhurst get channeled into them?
Dr. Wes is the Real Change Circulation Specialist, but, in addition to his skills with a spreadsheet, he writes this weekly column about whatever recent going-ons caught his attention. Dr. Wes has contributed to the paper since 1994. Curious about his process or have a response to one of his columns? Connect with him at [email protected].
Read more of the March 13–19, 2024 issue.