I just found this old, never-published blog post. It was written in October 2005 and saved as a draft — but not with the proper year-ahead date. So it got lost in the shuffle. Since we’re now in the dark of winter, it’s still quite relevant. Here it is:

I’m with Eugene: Forget the tinkering with Daylight Savings Time, I want more actual daylight!

Jim Lindgren’s extending Daylight Savings Time plan sounds good, but I’d much rather extend daylight. L.A., where I live, is already on average warmer and sunnier than most places in the U.S. Why shouldn’t it be on average lighter?

This whole everyone-gets-12-hours-of-daylight-a-day-on-average plan sounds wrong to me; another example of hyperegalitarianism run amok. Maybe even Communism. We Americans deserve better — there ought to be a law, or something. Sixteen hours a day of light on average, with eight hours of darkness, sounds about right to me, but I’ll be willing to compromise on 14-10. And, no, I’m not in the mood to move hemispheres myself twice a year; I want the light to come to me…

The dark but warm winter was one of the strangest aspects of life in my first year of living in Southern California. I’d always associated the shortened days with cold, but in Los Angeles (where I moved after college in St. Louis) it was reasonably warm but still dark way too much. Southern California isn’t all that far south after all!