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Although many associate daylight saving time with the last week of October, this year we will fall back in the first week of November.
In most of the United States, November 6 is the day to set your clocks back one hour, which will give you an extra hour of sleep (or of partying on Saturday night) – but the evenings will darken even earlier than they do now. The fall back marks the end of the daylight saving time (DST) period, which now begins the second Sunday of March and ends the first Sunday of November, according to energy legislation enacted in 2005 that extended daylight saving time.
As an article at The Huffington Post pointed out, the official term is daylight saving, but many Americans refer to it in the plural, as daylight savings.
Not all U.S. states and territories observe the confusing daylight saving time ritual. The federal government does not require those in Arizona, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, American Samoa, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands to change their clocks.
“If Arizona were to observe Daylight Saving Time, the sun would stay out until 9 p.m. in the summer (instead of 8 p.m., as it does now)” – which would be problematic during the months when the Grand Canyon State experiences extreme heat, according to a news story from an ABC affiliate in Arizona quoted by The Huffington Post.
“Daylight saving just brings a smile to everybody’s faces” – U.S. Rep. Ed Markey, D-Mass., who co-sponsored the bill extending daylight saving time, told National Geographic magazine in 2007.

Daylight Savings.

Ok, folks, here comes that one day sure to screw up your life for at least 24 hours, if not the entire week – Daylight Savings Time 2011.
That’s the day, Sunday, Nov. 6, 2011, when you have to set your clocks forward – not backward – one hour. Remember, that’s one week from now.
That little fact is lost on many, and results in people like this blogger, forgetting to adjust their clocks.
Fortunately, we have smartphones to do that for us. And if you’re anything like this blogger, you use your smartphone, in this case an Apple iPhone as your watch. It’s a more complicated physical process, reaching for the iPhone versus twisting and looking at the wrist, but it does the job.
But even with that, what confuses many is what time it is with respect to what they have to do, and when they wake up. That hour time difference just plain feels different and takes about a week to get used to.
So with all of that hassle, the question is, do we have to do this? Many say it helps to save energy, and that it was started in World WarI to save fuel by reducing the need to use artificial light.
But others say it’s unnecessary to have to do Daylight Savings at all.
My take is, given the way we work in an Internet age, I’m not sure Daylight Savings is the big energy saver it was in a time before the information age.

The Coalition was last night in disarray over a plot to move our clocks to “Berlin Time” after David Cameron slapped down Cabinet colleague Vince Cable.
The Prime Minister made his feelings clear after Mr Cable’s Business Department announced that it was considering giving support to a Bill that would force us to join German citizens in living an hour ahead of GMT in winter and two hours ahead in summer.
An immediate rebuke was issued by No 10, declaring that, as Scotland would never accept the darker winter mornings, the plan was dead in the water.
Critics say additional morning darkness is associated with an increase in road deaths and, if the change were made, much of the UK would still be dark when many parents do the school run.
“It will never be accepted up there” – the Downing Street source said. “And we wouldn’t let it happen without the entire UK being in agreement.
“So it’s not going to happen. Simple as that.”
However, last night a defiant Vince Cable refused to accept the strong hint to drop the idea. He told The Mail on Sunday – “We see merit in the Bill. But we have to proceed carefully and we have to build consensus in all the different parts of the UK.”
The row, which erupted on the eve of the clocks going back at 2am today, has stoked anger among Eurosceptic Conservatives.
Berlin Time has been promoted by supporters of the European Union’s efforts to harmonise members’ time zones, leading Tory opponents of the plan to claim that the attempt to revive the idea was being driven by pro-EU Liberal Democrats in the Government and was being tolerated by No 10 as a concession to Nick Clegg.
“It smacks of yet another Coalition compromise” – said one ministerial critic. “I don’t think it is a coincidence that the Business Department is top-heavy with Lib Dems.
“And it is the sort of thing that Clegg would like.”
One Government source even claimed that the idea had “the fingerprints” of Mr Cameron’s chief of staff, Ed Llewellyn, “all over it” as a “sop to the Cleggites”.