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Time change, pickup headlights and a joke
Jeff Whitten NEW
Jeff Whitten is managing editor of the Bryan County News and Coastal Courier, his favorite papers. - photo by File photo

We were going somewhere in my wife’s SUV the other evening, my wife and I. 

It was dark outside. Well, dark except for all the headlights and traffic lights and parking lot illumination you could probably see from Cleveland, Ohio, if you went up there for some silly reason.  

“What is it, midnight?” I asked.

“5:30 p.m.,” my wife answered, right after she said, “stop tailgating.”

I was incredulous, as they say, my circadian whatchamacallits not even remotely close to being caught up to the time change. 

“Goodness,” I said, yawning. “I totally forgot what night looked like. So this is it.”

We go to bed early, my wife and I. At least, I do. These days if I’m not sacked out with a good book by 9:30 p.m. something’s gone terribly wrong. I need at least 10 hours of shuteye or I’m grumpy all day the next day. And I don’t mean I’m surly or anything like that. I mean I look like that angry dwarf, the one they call Grumpy. 

“I know, right,” my wife said, because she does know and she is right. And when she doesn’t know, she asks me, and I check with her to make sure I’m right. 

“I hate this time change. I saw somewhere where some people up north are trying to get it changed,” she continued as I went about 40 mph from one red light to the next and repeated the process. 

“But they should let us vote on it, not just leave it up to a bunch of people who probably are being lobbied by the Daylight Savings Time lobby to keep it the same.” 

“That’s a good idea,” I said, as I suddenly nearly got run over by a pickup with headlights emitting a glare harsh enough to wake up everybody on Mars, if anybody’s still asleep up there now that we’re coming. 

“I always used to kind of like falling back,” I said, after I’d made sure there were no more armored personnel carrier-sized pickups with 14 HD battle ready headlights and a compensating driver about to come flying up my tailpipe. 

“Better to gain an hour than lose one,” I added. My wife looked at me like I had just confirmed her sneaking suspicion I am every bit as dumb as I look. But she took the high road.  

“I saw on Facebook the other day where Indians said only the white man would cut six inches off one end of a blanket and sew it back on the other end, and think that gave him a longer blanket,” she said. 

“That’s accurate,” I said, because it sounds just like a lot of white people I know, and I know a lot of us since we’re kind of a majority in most places, which is probably why we have things like Daylight Savings Time anyway. We just can’t stop messing with things.  

Anyhow, then I told my wife my new favorite joke. Stop reading here if you’ve heard this one before. 

“Turns out there was this South Georgia good ol’ boy who went to Hell,” I said. “And the Devil had the thermostat set to 98 degrees. The South Georgia good ol’ boy said, ‘hey, that’s nothing. I’m from South Georgia. We get that kind of hot around my house all the time.”

“So the devil turned up the heat to 110 degrees. And the good old boy said, ‘that’s not so bad, but I’ve been hotter.’”

“The Devil thought for a second and then said ‘I’ll fix him, I’ll go in the other direction,’ and he turned the thermostat in Hell down to minus-zero. And after about 10 minutes that South Georgia good ol’ boy was sitting there freezing with icicles hanging out his nose and he looked up at the Devil and said, ‘What, did the Falcons win the Super Bowl?’”

But back to the headlights. 

For some reason, automobile manufacturers are outfitting pickups and SUVs with headlights that create so much glare for the rest of us it’s a nuisance. Especially since it seems every other person these days has to own, or rent or borrow a $60,000 pickup with tiny little suns for headlamps, it seems the amount of traffic around here is increasing by a magnitude of 20 x 3.89 million and some change per week, chances are just backing out your driveway will expose you to enough glare to cook a corn dog if you don’t get run over first.   

Have a great week. 

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