the rules have changed today

This early start to Daylight Savings Time has played havoc with my internal sense of timekeeping. Seven o’clock sunsets in mid-March? It just doesn’t feel right. I’m sure someone stands to benefit from this hubristic manipulation of the natural order, but it ain't me. Instead I find myself muddling through the temporal dislocation of “The Twenty-Three Hour Day!” like the square-jawed, suit-and-tie-wearing hero of a Gardner Fox sci-fi story from an old issue of Mystery in Space:

“Watches function because of the crystals inside them! If I were to dissolve this quartz powder in a mixture of water and potassium, I should be able to slip into the missing hour that the Venusians have stolen to use as their base to invade earth!”

Editor’s note: Potassium has the atomic number 19! Potassium sodium tartrate is used in baking powder!

I used to love those stories (which were easily available as reprints in quarter bin filler titles like From Beyond the Unknown) as a kid. There’s something wonderfully batshit about the way DC tried to edify its readers as it attempted to entertain them in the fifties and sixties, even though so many of the facts were taken out of context or just plain wrong. Grant Morrison tries to use Fortean pseudo-science to achieve a similar effect, but it lacks the misguided sincerity at play in those old stories.

Unfortunately, there’s no amount of misapplied high school science capable of laying the blame for this mess as the feet/hooves/tentacles of some delightful, yet improbably goofy, aliens sprung from the drawing table of Murphy Anderson, Gil Kane, or Carmine Infantino. An act of Congress is to blame, and that’s something far more sinister and difficult to oppose than the Rocket Tyrants of Jupiter.

The Ramones – Time Has Come Today (from Subterranean Jungle, 1983) – You might think that this is a bit downtempo for a Ramones’ track, but it does clock in at 4m 25s, which makes it less than half as long as the Chambers Brothers’ original version.

The Outsiders – Time Won’t Let Me (from a 1966 single, collected on the Nuggets: Original Artyfacts From the First Psychedelic Era 1965-1968 box set, 1998) – One of the wife’s all time favorite songs. I think it’s a splendid piece of sixties’ pop rock, but whenever I listen to it, I can’t help thinking how two of the band members went on to record the oh-so-seventies, oh-so-mellow AM gold standard “Precious and Few” under the guise of Climax. (Not to be confused with these ladies.) Another fun fact: For some reason, when I try to recall how “Precious and Few” sounds, it inevitably morphs into The Association’s “Cherish.”