Lost hour

I lost an hour somewhere in the middle of the night. Has anyone seen it?

In all seriousness, I’m not such a big fan of the whole “spring ahead” half of Daylight Savings Time. I suggested the other day, via Twitter, that it ought to happen on weekday, preferably Friday, and would be a whole lot more popular if it did. Just imagine if you were at work, maybe in the long afternoon hour of three to four, and suddenly you just didn’t have one of those hours to worry about anymore. Suddenly, instead of two hours left in your workday, there was only just the one.

I haven’t quite worked out the whole “fall back” part of it just yet. If there was one day of the year when you’d be expected to work an extra hour, without extra pay, a whole lot of people would use that day to call in sick. It’s not a perfect — or even good — system, but there’s got to be something better than the outdated system we’re using now.

Anyway, I spent the hours I did have today not doing a whole lot. I watched another episode of Saturday Night Live’s first season, and I remain convinced that anyone who claims the show isn’t as good as it used to be, or that it just recycles sketches week too week, really needs to watch this first season in full. These episodes don’t just have recurring characters, and they don’t just reuse a lot of the same jokes; they re-air entire sketches and segments week to week. Think that fake commercial was funny the first time you saw it? It probably wasn’t, at least not very, but don’t worry, you’ll see the same exact commercial two or three more times at least. And yet there’s a weirdly endearing, “hey nobody’s watching this so we might as well just try anything we want” attitude that’s often sorely missing from the show nowadays. I’m not sure it’s something I want from the show, and I don’t think it would be at all a ratings success, but you kind of have to admire a show that gives both Loudon Wainwright III and ABBA two songs apiece in a single evening. Or at least wonder about what kind of weird parallel universe you’ve wandered off into.

I also went for a short walk, despite the not-quite-finished rain, and I finished the New York Times Sunday crossword. I also finished “Fright of the Bumblebees,” the first of Wallace & Gromit’s Grand Adventures. I really liked Telltale Games’ Monkey Island game, and I decided to give this one a try. There’s not a lot of re-play value in these episodic games, but I think the animation, humor, and puzzles are worth the price of admission. I bought all of the Wallace & Gromit adventures, so I’ll probably play the others in the weeks to come.

And then later this evening, I watched a couple of episodes from Masters of Horror (“Incident On and Off a Mountain Road” and “Cigarette Burns”), looking for a good and quick scare. They both had their moments, “Incident” in particular, but both fell a little short of spectacular. With rare (but well known) exceptions, anthology series are usually like that.

Oh, and I finally finished doing my taxes. It’s not so difficult — though not as easy, apparently, as it could be — but I still don’t love doing it. My father bought H&R Block’s home software, so that’s what I was using, though I did notice at one point a grammatical error in its on-screen explanations. What can I say? I’m an editor. It’s not like I can just turn that part of my brain off.

Anyway, now I think I’m going to go to bed. It doesn’t necessarily feel like bedtime — it does, in fact, feel like it’s an hour earlier — but I’ve got to go to work tomorrow.