don’t turn back your clocks yet.

Because of a new energy saving law Congress passed in 2005 Daylight Savings Time (DST) doesn’t officially start until 2:00 AM on November the 4th of this year.

On the old DST, today would have been the day to turn back your clocks and it would have been an hour earlier in Knoxville now.

Those helpful folks at our federal government figure that if you have more daylight at the end of the day you’ll consume less energy, i.e. electricity, etc., so DST is an energy savings measure.

Part of the downside is that it also gets light later in the morning causing some Knoxville area school children to have to wait in the dark for their school busses to come exposing them to obvious dangers from traffic.

In states like Tennessee which is bisected by the Central Time zone and the Eastern one, it is doubly confusing to get in turn with the new time change for a few days.

Arizona and Hawaii are the only two states that choose not to observe DST and stay on standard time the year round.

And pity the poor people in Indiana which not only did not observe Daylight Savings Time until 2005 but had their own unique and complex time system. Not only is the state split between two time zones, but until recently, only some parts of the state observed daylight saving time while the majority did not.

Under the old system, 77 of the state’s 92 counties were in the Eastern Time Zone but did not change to daylight time in April. Instead they remained on standard time all year. That is, except for two counties near Cincinnati, Ohio, and Louisville, Ky., which did use daylight time.

But the counties in the northwest corner of the state (near Chicago) and the southwestern tip (near Evansville), which are in the Central Time Zone, used both standard and daylight time.

I think if I were visiting Indiana I would simply ask a native the time instead of trying to figure it out. ;-)