"Hey Yogi, what time is it?" "You mean now?"

I am not the smartest man anyone will ever meet. A man's just got to know his limitations, right! And I know people ranging from someone who refused to eat corned beef because "they just keep these little cows in a pen, and all they let them eat is corn, and it's so mean!" to a guy who was driving north on I-83 and encountered a car heading south with a stuck horn blaring. Doing a bit of mental jotto from the Doppler Effect of the change of pitch of that horn, and factoring in his own speed, John was able to calculate the speed of the car heading south. That's brains, is what that is.

I know where corned beef comes from. I am simply mad about cows. But I can't even figure how fast I'm driving without a look at the speedometer - the device on my dashboard for holding coupons and sticky notes. However, I know another way to figure out how fast that car was going. Simply get off at the next exit, get back on 83 headed southbound, drive like a bastard and catch up with him, follow him home and then ask "Excuse me, but how fast were you driving on the interstate? I need to know this because....."

Done and done.

But in the interest of allowing everyone to gauge my relative IQ (right now, you're thinking it's somewhere between Stephen Hawking and the guy who told Mitt Romney "Don't change a thing - people like you the way you are!"), I have to be totally honest about one huge mental black hole.

Daylight Savings Time.

Oh yeah, I pretty much have that "spring forward, fall backward" thing memorized, But how does it come that every time we either spring or fall, I have to get a pencil and paper and calculate whether it will be darker or lighter in the morning, and then do the same figurin' thing for dinnertime? Then I get really confused, because I have come to associate nightfall with the time that the "King of Queens" rerun comes on channel 45. Now, nightfall will coincide with "Two and a Half Men."

I have a friend who works in Kansas City and I keep meaning to give her a call at work one of these weekend mornings, but there only are certain times she can get a call. I am so afraid that I can't figure out that when it's 8 AM in Baltimore, it's 7 AM in Kansas City. Or is it 9 there already?

When we drove to Pensacola in 2004 for Drew and Laura's wedding, I was momentarily distracted from blissful daydreams involving grits and waffles, the two foods that make traveling through the sunny South such a blissful daydream, when we passed a sign even more terrifying to me than the one that says "Now entering radiation zone." It was a rather small sign for the terror it handed to me: Now entering Central Time Zone. ! Well, I come through Alabama with a steering wheel on my knee, for I'm programming my Timex Ironman, the right time for to see, as Stephen Foster would have said, had he cared. The rented minivan careered* across the state line out of Georgia as I entered this whole new dimension in which Letterman comes on at 10:35, the late news is on during dinner, and Dios Mio, what would happen if you were driving across that state line at 2 AM tomorrow morning? What time would it be when you got to one of the 27 conveniently located Waffle House, Waffle King, Wafflemaster or El Waffle Loco restaurants in Opelika?

Time to join this group, that's what time it is! Fight for your syrup amendment rights! I'll talk to you tomorrow...sometime.

* To "careen" means to tilt or tip over and to "career" means to speed wildly out of control.
(I had to look it up.)