CBS NEWS
(CBS News) -- Most of us will be moving our clocks ahead one hour this weekend, with daylight saving time going into effect.
For some, it's a minor annoyance. Others want to get rid of it altogether, even petitioning the White House.
There
is no spring-forward in tropical Hawaii, nor in arid Arizona where the
thought of scorching summer days ending at 9 p.m. got people hot and
bothered. They also don't set clocks ahead in the Hopi Nation, in
northeast Arizona, but they do in the Navajo Nation, which completely
surrounds it. Call it a "daylight saving donut."
Michael
Downing, a Tufts University lecturer, said daylight saving was
originally meant to save electricity with lighting at homes.
"Here's the problem: in Detroit on Sunday, people are going to wake
up, and the sunrise won't occur until 8 o'clock, and they're going to
have to turn on lights," he said.
Downing, the author of
"Spring Forward," says daylight saving time is a boon for retailers.
Downing said, "If you give Americans daylight at the end of the work
day, they're more apt to shop on the way home."
But they
have less time to drink. In 1997, Ohio University students rioted after
clocks were shifted ahead and bars were forced to close an hour early.
In
Russia, daylight saving time pits President Vladimir Putin against his
protege, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, who abolished it in 2011.
At
stake are lucrative primetime broadcasts of the 2014 Winter Olympics in
Sochi. Russia was first put on daylight saving time by Joseph Stalin in
1928. But, Downing explained, "When October came, the Russians forgot
to fall back. It wasn't until 1985 that an AP reporter stumbled onto the
fact that the clocks were all wrong in Russia."
Only time will tell when all of this confusion will end.