Daily Archives: Sun,March/8/2009

Bored

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wall

Not much to do on a dreary Sunday afternoon so I took a picture of a wall.  Actually it’s part of one wall in my home office.  Shows how much of an aviation nut I really am.

Clockwise from top:

A picture of a McDonnell Douglas DC-10 series 20 that was given to employees in celebration of its first visit to Toronto in September 1972.  Back then the plant was officially called “Douglas Aircraft Company of Canada Ltd” and was located at the Northeast corner of the land now owned by GTAA (Pearson International Airport).  The buildings, which were torn down a few years ago, were also once home to Victory Aircraft (Lancasters were built there) and Avro (home of the Arrow).

Western Airlines promotional poster from 1961.  Western Airlines (1925-1986) started off carrying mail and died when purchased by Delta.  In between they flew all the aircraft shown on the poster – from a Douglas M-2 biplane to the Boeing 720B.  The tag line is interesting “From Biplane to Fanjet, 22 Aircraft Types Have Carried the Colors of Western Airlines, America’s Pioneer Airline”  An eBay find.

Opening the TSX.  A recent addition to the wall.

Autographed picture of CF-18.  One of my photos that I had autographed by the pilot who flew it in for Wings & Wheels 2008.  “Cherry” was a great young man, very professional and friendly.  And he likes to fly the Hornet low and fast!  The shot was taken as he ran one of his runway “checks”.  Since you can’t fly acrobatics over Toronto, Cherry announced that he was a little heavy on fuel and was running a series of runway checks to look for debris or obstructions before landing.  Very low, very fast, very loud. Along with his signature it reads “Keep the blue side up” and I’ve tried to keep that in mind during my flight training.

Nearly every wall, cabinet and piece of floor has something aviation related.  Every piece tells a story.

Daylight Saving Time

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Right off the bat, let’s clear up the misconception that Sir Sandford Fleming is responsible for this mess.  Sir Sandford brought us Standard Time and I think we all agree that this was a pretty good idea.  Little known fact – he came up with the idea after missing a train!

The culprit here is William Willett who first came up with the stupid idea in 1907.  Some say it was Benjamin Franklin but he only suggested it as a joke.

From Wikipedia:

Using his own financial resources, in 1907 William published a pamphlet "The Waste of Daylight" In it he proposed that the clocks should be advanced by 80 minutes in the summer. The evenings would then remain light for longer, increasing daylight recreation time and also saving ₤2.5 million in lighting costs. He suggested that the clocks should be advanced by 20 minutes at a time at 2 am on successive Sundays in April and be retarded by the same amount on Sundays in September.

I guess it’s a good thing that the 80 minute thing didn’t catch on.  We all got used to it up until a couple of years ago when the US (thanks Bush Jr.) decided to switch to DST earlier and switch back later.  Of course Canada wagged its tail and followed suit.

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Supposedly, DST was adopted to help farmers and others who depend on daylight to perform their work but  arguments covering everything from the fact that more french fries are sold during the day (helping the Idaho potato farmers) to more daylight = more time for outdoor sports (Sporting Goods Manufacturing Coalition) have been used to support a practice that, in my opinion, is no longer necessary.

This diagram shows what areas of the world use, or do not use, DST.  In Canada, Saskatchewan never changes the clock.  Last time I looked Saskatchewan has a lot of farmers so there goes that argument.

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So we spend the next few days in a sleep deprived state as our body clocks reset and I have to remember that Switzerland is only 5 hours ahead instead of 6 (most of the civilized world doesn’t change for another couple of weeks).

(images from Wikipedia)