Saturday, December 17, 2005
frankly parsimonious
It sure is dark early these days. I remember the days when it didn’t use to be this way. Just a few months ago, the dawn broke brightly before I got out of bed. Now I arise in stumbling darkness, smashing my unprotected toes into heavy furniture while the daylight hides from my eyes. As the solstice approaches and the gloom reaches its nadir, I am drawn to recall the history of why the hell it’s so goddamn dark in the mornings now. Gather ‘round, children, and be misinformed.
Anyone who’s read the Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin is sure to have asked this rhetorical question: “Who wrote this crap?” Well that’s an easy one, chum. Benjamin Franklin was one of the few of our founding fathers actually to have fathered foundlings. He not only wrote the 3rd, 8th, and (unratified) original 12th amendment (vouchsafing the people’s right to “prurient and lascivious materials"), he also discovered electricity, built the first ever rotisseie pizza oven, and invented France. Named after the $100 bill, Bennifrank (as he was known at the time) overcame a childhood of tallow-soaked poverty and rose to a position of international acclaim, what with his coonskin cap and his charmingly rustic lamb-gut condoms. He wrote and published one of the most important magazines of the day, built a glass harpsichord, and founded a debtor’s workshop that eventually became the least-known college in the ivy league. He wielded a stale day-old baguette like Sheriff Buford Pusser carries a 4x4 in the 1973 film Walking Tall, or in the 2004 remake thereof, also entitled Walking Tall. He was the first man to cook Crepes Suzette, and, likewise, the first to streak the United States Congress. He was a towering figure of manhood at a time of knee-breeches and gay looking wigs. He was our national aspiration, personified.
But today, Benjamin Franklin is best known for screwing up our circadian schedules. Daylight Savings Time was a Franklinism, one of literally billions of whackball ideas he forced himself to disgorge during his daily “brainfart” sessions. Benji noticed between madiera binges that days in the wintertime were shorter than days in the summertime, and in his quaint colonial way he thought he could adjust the fabric of time itself to cover the gap. It was not until the invention of “sleeping in” some 127 years later that DST was initiated on a wide-scale basis, since when it has established itself as the single most important event of the year, especially for smoke-alarm batteries. Annually, schoolchildren cavort with glee at DST parades on our nation’s parks and boulevards, and factories throw their doors open for DST free-for-alls. Truly, it is a day of wonders.
But ol’ Frankles didn’t just come up with this idea, as he did with so many other things, out of thin air. He actually beta-tested several alternate models of DST, to see which one best suited his overall purposes of world domination and colonial studliness. While the saving of “daylight” turned out to provide the most reputation-enhancing bang for his self-printed buck, he did seriously study other possibilities. My investigations at the Franklin Institute of Imaginary Research have uncovered, in a foolscap scrap lodged in the dustjacket of the 18th century bestseller Mrs. Washington’s Falsies, the following list of THINGS BENJAMIN FRANKLIN CONSIDERED SAVING BEFORE HE DECIDED ON DAYLIGHT:
Urea
Soot
Twist-ties
Nitelites
Indigenous Peoples
French Strumpets
Wig Powder
Cod
Quakers
Nascent Democracy
Keep the legacy of this American Hero alive, if you have the moral fortitude to follow in his tiny feminine footsteps. Start saving random stuff today. By the springtime, we may have another goddamn holiday to celebrate.
