Saturday, September 15, 2007

synchronize your watches, folks


In Israel, the clocks are due to fall back an hour at two in the morning, which will become one am. You know the drill. But the West Bank already changed theirs on Thursday, and Gaza cranked theirs back a week before. Effectively, there have been three different time zones in the Holy Land this week, which makes for lots of confusion.Not that anyone ever counts on getting to an appointment on time if they must cross a checkpoint. Sadly, it is symptomatic that we cannot even agree on the basic stuff, so what chance is there of achieving Peace through dialogue?
This part of the world is not the only place where the government turns back time by decree. In Britain, Summer Time won't end until Sunday, October 28, 2007 at 2:00 AM , weeks away. And in the United States, they'll stay on Daylight Savings Time through Sunday, November 4, 2007.

1 comment:

Weekilter said...

For *years* it was always an uncertainty *if* or *when* Israel would go on "summer" or daylight time. There was always some mishigas instigated (of course) by the ultra-frum regioners. Where the rest of the world (for a time) could devise devices that would automagically change the time in all sorts of devices such as computers, video recorders and other fun stuff. But because Israel never had any kind of constant time for this to happen (or not) that functionality could not be implemented on devices in Israel. The decision for the USA to extend daylight time to November in the autumn and to start it again in March also broke many devices that had automatic time change adjustment hard-wired into the devices. So you have to either defeat the automaticness or make two adjustments to keep the clocks somewhat in reality of the present time.