Psst! Hey, bud, you got the time?

The following public service announcement is brought to you by the Daily Yak, your source for news, information and the thrilling(?) adventures of a stay-at-home dad. And of course, coming soon, Yak-emblazoned undergarments. Uh-hem....

Daylight Saving Time starts at 2:00am tonight (well, actually, that would technically be tomorrow morning) in most of North America. So please remember to set your clocks ahead one hour (you know... Spring ahead, Fall back). This is also an excellent time to change the batteries in your smoke detectors. Thank you!

We now rejoin our regularly scheduled Yak....

Yep, it's that time of year again, folks. Don't you hate losing that hour of sleep? You know your kids (if they're little like mine) just don't get it. Their schedule is going to be thrown off, and it's us parents who suffer. Wait.... We don't really have a schedule per se... they pretty much get up when they're ready to get up regardless of what the clock says. But, still, I don't like losing an hour!

Anyway, like it or not Daylight Saving Time is a reality here. Did you know it's actually codified into law? Yep. Title 15, Chapter 6, Subchapter IX of the US Code. Checking clocks apparently falls under the jurisdiction of Secretary of Transportation, Norm Mineta. Congress directed the Secretary "to foster and promote widespread and uniform adoption and observance of the same standard of time within and throughout each such standard time zone." That's in Section 260 of the Code. Sounds like serious stuff.

I know you're wondering how we came up with this whole idea of saving more daylight by switching our clocks around. Well, the good folks of the US Naval Observatory, our nation's official time keepers, have provided a brief history of Daylight Time in the US.

Of course not everyone is pleased with the whole idea. There's a whole movement and petition thing going on to abolish the time change and even reduce the number of time zones in the US. I think maybe they're just pissed because Dick Cheney lives on the grounds of the Naval Observatory in Washington, DC.

It's not just the US either, many countries observe some form of Daylight Saving Time (even though they don't have Dick Cheney).

Anyway, if you just want to find out what time it is, you can check out the official US time here.