Spring has come to St. Louis!!...for now. The weather here is completely unpredictable. Right now it is sunny and for the most part warm, but the low tonight is supposed to be in the 40's. It gets really warm every once in awhile for about a day, then it gets cold again. I don't think mother nature realizes that it is nearing the middle of April.

Speaking of April, this past weekend was one of my least favorite annual holidays: Spring Forward, a time when the entire country (minus rural Indiana and other backwoodsy locations) loses an hour of sleep so that farmers can have extra daylight. In protest to this cruel punishment, I have proposed that instead of conforming to national "standards", we should all turn our clocks back one hour in both the Spring and the Fall. This way we never actually lose any sleep, we gain an hour each time.

Sure, a few years down the road it will end up being daylight at midnight and pitch black at noon, but think of how productive we would be if we worked from 9-5 in the pitch black? No temptation to go outside and lie in the sun or skip class to play basketball. The only alternative would be to sleep, and people already sleep through class anyway. And the business impact would be even more beneficial, since it's already hard enough to do business with Tokyo when they are 12 hours ahead of us. This would synch our clocks with other financial powers every once in awhile.

If this catches on, we could even start turning our clocks back more frequently. Why gain an hour of sleep only twice a year? Why not every month, or even every week? The statistics on sleep disorders are staggering, think of how much extra sleep we as Americans would get. Say I had a paper due tomorrow and stayed up late working on it. Should I get only 2 hours of sleep and risk mental anguish and physical setbacks, or should I just turn my clock back a few hours and get all the sleep I need? The possibilities are staggering.

With a little help from our government, this could be revolutionary. Even more so than "The Duke"'s inane Score Point Five suggestion.