It's too late to argue about daylight savings time

Nobody will ever do anything about daylight savings time. "Hold on," you say, "that was last week. Why are you bringing this up now?" Because that's exactly why nothing will be done — because it's not an issue this week.

Sure, last week there was the usual muted bleats and impotent mutters, but everyone set their clocks back, and the entire conversation about DST died with the first cock's crow because we have the attention spans of fruit flies. We will revisit this in the spring, have the same conversation, and change nothing. Rinse, repeat.

"Hold on again," you say. "Did the shampoo companies really add 'repeat' to double consumption, or is that just an urban legend? And are there such things as rural legends, as long as we're at it? If you had a legend that arose somewhere between Anoka and Big Lake, would it be urban, rural or exurban?"

So you want to change the subject, I see. You're ashamed that I pointed out how we all obey the clock-changing law with unquestioning obedience. That's fine. There should be no shame about the subject, especially when it comes to an unpopular truth.

Some of us ... like the early sunsets.

Winter might be a time when you're out schussing on cross-country skis and you prize that extra hour of light, twinkling through the ice-encrusted branches, but most of us are home making dinner, following some instinctive need to carb-load and hibernate. The dark is a fine setting for the lights we add to the trees and the home as well, an act of defiance, of decorating the cold blank nullity of a winter night.

We hunker and wait for Dec. 21, when the long declining day stops, gathers itself, takes a breath, and starts the victory march to spring.

Would you stop with that already? We don't even know if the bottles still say that. Let me check ... OK, the stuff I use does not say repeat. It says Lather, Wash, Rinse. I don't know why they have to tell you that in the first place, but we should be grateful the label instructions don't say "Apply to head with hands," because that would suggest that some dolts daub it on the shower wall and rub their noggins against the tile.

Anyway, there's just no incentive for the authorities in charge of clock realignment to make the change. I know it sounds a bit cynical, but letters to the editor and Facebook posts are sometimes insufficient to bestir the Leviathan to act.

The cynics will suspect that we are meant to argue over this issue to keep us from noticing the real questions of our time, such as how your combo shampoo-conditioner knows when to stop cleaning and start adding the conditioner elements. But the very fact that they combine the two, when they could sell you two different products for more money, argues against the whole "rinse-repeat" conspiracy mentality.

I mean, my shampoo is also body wash. There's no reason they had to do that. No one would have thought about that, but guys are like, "Hey, get it all in one bottle? Can you maybe add mouthwash and an anti-fungal?"