Zulu Time

Even though I have managed to get through yet another phase-shift ( time-warp, interdimensional taffy-pull) of the grand temporal reversal of Daylight Savings Time to Standard Time all in one piece and actually on time, I have decided to set my time pieces to Zulu Time, or Greenwich Time for those of you who have problems with the military-industrial complex flavor of Zulu Time ( that used by the US military....essentially Greenwich without the aftertaste of Brits.) This year of 2007 was especially significant since it witnessed the foremost effort of energy conservation exerted by the US Congress and White House hitherto: pushing back the change to standard time by an entire week in order to conserve energy. I recall when this draconian law was being debated in the Congress. I think it was a bit after Katrina; not too soon after, though. It was perhaps in 2006? And even though Katrina was old and a jade, still a number of our fellow citizens lives were enwrapped within the toxic embrace of that old sea hag, Katrina. My problem with "the Change" stems from too many diddles...(pause...hopefully for laughter...) O.K. The word is not "diddles". Neither is it "riddles". What is the bloody name for a bit of doggerel with rhyme that one, usually pre-schoolers, recites in order to aide the old memoire? (Curses! I wish I had a bit of rhyming doggerel I could use to remember that other bit of rhyming doggerel...this is how I discovered recursive functions when I read Maths with Johnny Von Neumann, by the by.) It is coming to me slowly. It did not rhyme. It was short and pithy. It was a brief hoodia of recall. I apparently thought it was something like, "Red skies in the morning...", but it wasn't. It was: Spring forward; Fall back. Now this nostrum for "the Change" is everything a bloke would want. It is clear and precise and ready to take to the pharmacy to be filled and have you back in the snuff in no time. It indicates the manner of horological modification at the proper season, as well as indicating a lower level logic, a sub-motif if you will, which marks it indelibly within the vasty warehouse of memory; sort of a " (if) you spring forward, (then) (in the fullness of time) (in this the best of all worlds) (god-willing and the creek don't rise) you must fall backwards (eventually)." Sweet. Or, sweet as, as the ANZAC contingent would have it; mostly the NZ portion thereof. This type of old saying is, however, fraught with peril, for its obverse makes perfectly good sense also. This was the source of my utter downfall. For I, upon rising that ill-fated autumnal day, recited the old saying as: Spring back; Fall forward. I even checked myself. Does this make any sense? Might I not spring back, given sufficient provocation? Say, for example, my dear wife were to surprise me on Christmas morn with an elegantly wrapped gift box containing a hooded cobra? Yes. I would indeed spring back, and with considerable alacrity, I might add. Step 2 of the pithy nugget of wisdom: does the "fall" part make sense? Well, let's assume for the sake of argument that I was back in the army...say Vietnam or Laos...and while were at it, let's go all the way and say with Allenby in Jerusalem ( I say Allenby because the general was in Zululand around the late 1880s and I seem to remember that I started this post with something about Zulus.)...and I am standing in ranks with full kit under a blazing sun... Hmmm. This is a bit of a Bridge too far over the River Kwai, come to think of it. O.K. River Kwai, full kit, blazing sun, Alec Guiness, and Sessue Hayakawa... After 3 hours of this, men begin dropping like flies. They collapse and fall forward out of ranks! Perfect sense. So now, having two perfectly good pieces of doggerel which are totally at odds the one to the other, what does one do? Well, happy to say I chose correctly this time and I did not have the unnerving experience of going out for my morning jog and finding the milk man and his horse just coming onto the streets of our fair village at some mind-shattering early hour.