Enjoying the thought of seeing evening sunshine; or, What 'is' time?!?

We’re now in that time of year that seems to offend a certain segment of our society in a way that I never truly will comprehend.

How was your Monday?

I’m referring to the concept of Daylight Saving Time – where the clocks are adjusted by an hour so as to create as much daylight as possible.

BY THE TIME the concept reaches its peak in mid-June, we’ll have the sun still shining in the skies above us until about 9 p.m. Which is certainly a more pleasing notion than the idea of sundown arriving by about 4:30 p.m. – which is what it was at back in December when so-called “natural time” is at its peak.

I like the idea of as much daylight as possible. I wish it were possible to have Daylight Saving Time year-round – and yes, I realize the vagaries of the Earth’s tilt and natural rotation around the Sun would mean we couldn’t ever have a year-round sundown around 9 p.m.

So I’m happy to think the amount of daylight we’re going to experience will stretch out longer and longer with the coming days. It’s like we get a little more time to use to get our business done.

Although I’m also aware that my view is not a popular one amongst some people. For all I know, some people reading this are now shouting choice obscenities and questioning my overall intelligence quotient.

SOME PEOPLE WANT to think that standard time is the way things are supposed to be. As though we’re somehow messing with Mother Nature’s natural structure of our Earth by altering time.

Even though time, itself, is a man-made concept. The time zones created originally in this country to accommodate railroad schedules.

Or, back in the Soviet Union of old – which was such a large country that it stretched across 11 of the globe’s 24 time zones (as opposed to the continental United States that covers four zones), yet all 11 zones were put on “Moscow Time.”

Way too accurate to be humorous

Which meant there were the easternmost regions of that nation that spent much of their days in the dark. THAT MAY BE the most depressing part of the U.S.S.R.

WHICH MAKES ME appreciate the idea of the coming of more daylight all the more.

Waking up on Sunday at 8 a.m. because my body clock thought it was still 7 a.m. wasn’t a jolt to me the way some people complain about losing the hour – particularly since later in the year when the time changes back, we’ll gain an extra hour of time.

Although if you want real confusion over time, consider the situation right here in Illinois and nearby Indiana. Most of the Hoosier State falls within the Eastern Time Zone, while we in Illinois are an hour behind in the Central Time Zone.

Except for the far northwesternmost-corner of Indiana that is also Central. Which puts places like Gary and Valparaiso an hour behind the rest of the state – including the capital city of Indianapolis.

THAT PREDICAMENT HAS some Indiana officials thinking the whole state ought to shift to one time zone – the Central. Which would put all of the state in line with Chicago-, rather than New York-time.

Which in a certain sense would be logical – all of the Midwestern U.S, on a common time zone. Although some are complaining that now Indiana would be split off from its eastern and southern neighbors.

Need a new watch?

Evansville, Ind., and Louisville, Ky., would wind up in different zones (with a Kentucky city being an hour ahead). Somehow, that seems odd.

Whether that idea will ever come about is uncertain. The state’s Legislature is running into people who think it’s “natural” for the status-quo to remain. Perhaps they’re the kind who wish the time hadn’t changed this week so they could remain in the dark.

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EDITOR'S NOTE: One thing I like about professional baseball -- the entirety of the season from April through late October, takes place during Daylight Saving Time. Time changes back to standard time Nov. 4.

Will people who once would have deplored U.S./Russia tie now be Trump's biggest partisan backers?

It seems that President-elect Donald J. Trump has picked a corporate executive-type person to be secretary of state, and now we’re hearing the allegations that this person is a Russian sympathizer, of sorts.
 

Who's who in this relationship?

Which also combines with the weekend news reports that say the Russian government, in what seems to be its own warped idea of a prank meant to display the inferiority of the Democratic way of life, managed to cause enough havoc with computer hacking to alter the Election Day results of a month ago.

WE’RE NOT SURE just how, or to what degree. But the implication being that some will now believe that Russian premier Vladimir Putin had more of a say in Trump being able to defeat Hillary Clinton than did the will of the voters.

If this were the old days, I’m sure we’d be hearing all kinds of hostile rhetoric and threats calling for the impeachment of Trump before he could even be formally confirmed by the Electoral College and Congress as U.S. president.

We might even hear talk of “commies” and all the other Cold War-era trash talk. Except that technically, Russia isn’t Communist any longer.

Heck, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics hasn’t existed in decades. There are young people who cast their first ballots in this year’s election cycle who would have no first-hand concept of what the Soviet Union was.

AND AS FOR some older people, they are inclined to think there is no real difference.

Particularly since Russian head Putin does date his own government service back to the USSR (which wasn’t just the subject of a Beatles song that itself was a takeoff on all-American Chuck Berry’s “Back in the U.S.A.”).

If Trump/Putin are Robin/Batman, was Clinton some sort of Catwoman turned good?,

For Putin was a one-time head of the KGB and an intelligence official within the new Russian Federation.

My point being that it astounds me that the ideologues of our society who once would have been scared out of their wits out of the very mention of Russian influence within our government are now going to be the ones who will speak out the loudest in Trump’s defense.

 

CONWAY: Does she believe anything she says?

AFTER ALL, HE’S the guy with the “Make America Great Again” vision that mostly consists of ignoring anything that white people don’t particularly feel like addressing.

Trump spokeswoman Kellyanne Conway officially denounces the talk of Russian influence over the elections as “laughable and ridiculous.” Because I’m sure the last thing that she’d want to admit is that Trump is more than capable of falling for the nefarious pranks of a potentially-hostile nation.

As for the new secretary of state, he’s the former head of Exxon-Mobil. Rex Tillerson has been CEO since 2006, and Trump says he likes the idea that he has negotiated deals for that company with foreign governments – including Russia.

Of course, he’s been used to negotiating deals that could focus on a certain bottom line that would benefit the stockholders of his own company – and certainly didn’t have to take into account the concerns of the United States of America as a whole.

ALTHOUGH IT SHOULDN’T be a surprise. If you think about it, Trump is a corporate-minded person who is inclined to think government gets in the way of his own business dealings. Why shouldn’t he be expected to pick a batch of corporate-minded people.

That’s what the people who managed to give Trump a majority of the Electoral College vote should have realized they were creating for this country’s leadership when they marked their ballots for Trump accordingly. They voted for “Robin” to Putin’s “Batman.”

 

CLINTON: Did Russia "fear" her?

I’m sure the ideologues, now that it suits their partisan interests, will claim that the past is the past and that we’re all friendly with Russia, even though British Defense Secretary Michael Fallon said Saturday to the BBC that Putin’s interests are in propping up his own nation and that the U.S. shouldn’t be so eager to treat it as an equal partner.

Then again, a Trump presidency was eager to aggravate China by talking openly with Taiwan just a few weeks ago and now says he doesn’t feel bound by the “One China” policy the U.S. has held for years – making me wonder if that was merely because the Chinese government didn’t offer similar assistance in his desire to beat Clinton. And whom we should now think of as the “real American” whose presence the Russians would have feared!

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I don’t remember where I was 40 yrs ago, but NASA didn’t leave my psyche cold

It is at moments like this that I feel like Homer Simpson.

The occasionally oafish pater familias of the Simpson clan (which has been around for nearly two full decades now) was alive in animated form on that day 40 years ago today when Neil Armstrong left his footprints on the surface of the Moon.

YET IT MADE little impact on his psyche (remember the episode that contained a flashback letting us know that at the moment the rest of the world was captivated at the thought of human beings walking on the lunar surface, a then-teenaged Homer was more interested in listening to his radio – the 1910 Fruitgum Co.’s “Yummy, Yummy” was playing).

It made an equal impression on my psyche as well – I have no recollection of the day. Although in my defense, I was 3 years old, getting ready to turn 4 about a month later.

So I can’t share some heartwarming tale of how a youthful version of myself living then in the East Side neighborhood was inspired to think big and shoot for significant goals and achievements in life.

For me, it was a pair of later Apollo missions (those were the National Aeronautics and Space Administration efforts of the late 1960s to the early 1970s to go to the Moon) that caught my attention.

FOR I CAN remember where I was on the day that Apollo 14 landed on the lunar surface. That was the third successful Moon mission (we all have Tom Hanks and the film “Apollo 13” to thank for teaching us what little we know of the one unsuccessful mission in between).

I can remember being in kindergarten on the day when that mission touched down on the moon. It wasn’t every day back then that a television set was wheeled into the classroom.

And it was definitely a treat that my teacher, Mrs. Pugh, didn’t insist on having us 5-year-olds take our daily nap.

Instead, we got to watch the news broadcasts of the day (Feb. 5, 1971) that Alan Shepard Jr. and Stuart A. Roosa did their attempt to leave their footprints for immortality on the Moon.

I KNOW SOME of us in the kindergarten class at Patton Elementary School in suburban Riverdale (we had moved from the East Side by then) saw nothing more than grainy black-and-white pictures – the way that some people are going to want to denigrate the images that will be reshown over and over again on Monday of the moment that Armstrong put his foot on the Moon.

But one has to admit that it was quite an achievement – being able to take ourselves to the surface of another sphere in this universe. It is Step One in the ongoing process to which we have yet to this day been unable to advance – visits to another planet.

The day that technology is advanced enough to let us send anything more than satellites and probes and other mechanical devices to land on the surface of Mars or any other planet will be a great moment – one that will eclipse the Moon landing because, let’s face it, the Moon ultimately is little more than a giant rock floating in space.

Now some people are going to claim that I’m somehow missing the point by bringing up Apollo 14, rather than focusing on Apollo 11. But when one considers just how few people have ever walked on the lunar surface, I’d have to say it is a pretty exclusive “club.”

WHY SHOULD ARMSTRONG get all the attention?

Of course, federal budget constraints of the 1970s and the impression among many people in this country that there wasn’t much of anything on the Moon worth visiting caused the end of the Apollo project.

NASA has done many space flights since those days, but none of them seem to give off the same inspiring aura of 1969. In fact, ever since 1975, I’d have to argue that the only time NASA comes into the public consciousness is when something goes wrong severely enough that people die.

The reason I mention ’75 is that I remember being a nine-year-old inspired by the whole concept of Apollo-Soyuz.

THAT WAS IN the midst of the Cold War and when people who engaged in rants about “the godless Commies” were actually taken seriously.

So for NASA to cooperate with the Soviet space program and engage in a joint mission had ramifications that went far beyond the meager scientific goals that were accomplished for the couple of days that a U.S. and a Soviet space craft were docked together.

Astronauts and cosmonauts were as one for a few days. The idea of a cosmonaut seeing the inside of a NASA spacecraft wasn’t treated as potential for the leaking of national security in the form of specifications of how advanced the U.S. space program was. It was a time when people for a couple of days put aside politics out of a desire to advance the betterment of mankind.

And if that is the youthful impression I developed of NASA, perhaps it is the attitude we ought to remember on this anniversary of the day that Armstrong engaged in his now classic slip of the tongue that underestimated the significance of human beings walking the lunar surface.

-30-

EDITOR’S NOTES: I may not remember where I was 40 years ago today, but some NASA (http://www.lpi.usra.edu/lunar/missions/apollo/apollo_14/) missions from my youth (http://history.nasa.gov/apollo/apsoyhist.html) left their impressions on my mind.