All Hell Scheduled to Break Loose: Monday, 7:00 AM

Energy prices are high everywhere. While President Bush presents his own modest proposals for dealing with gas prices in America, Guatemala is taking a more revolutionary approach: Daylight Savings Time. Apparently they tried it once before, five years ago or so, decided it wasn't for them, and haven't tried it since. But this year, they're trying again. The results for a country that is generally not familiar with daylight savings time as a concept, not really all that big on time as a concept to begin with, and not much on trusting the government or consuming any news media should be interesting. At The Lovely's school, they were trying to explain it by saying "You have to show up an hour earlier, but you get to leave an hour earlier," without really noting that the clocks would still say the same time when you showed up. There were newspaper ads explaining that you didn't actually have to get up at midnight to change your clock, you could do it before you went to sleep and it would work out fine. I concede that it is sort of a weird concept to grasp if you haven't grown up with it, while still hoping that they'll wind up screwing everything up and we'll wind up with sunset at 10:30 PM.