Waiting for the Great Leap Forward

Well, Sunday marked a monumental moment in the history of a loose association of counties in Northwestern Indiana, as certain arbitrary portions of the state decided to capitulate to the wisdom of Ben Franklin and take a plunge into the wacky modern phenomenon known as Daylight Savings Time. Needless to say, this move has been much to the dismay of crusy bastards everywhere like this hard-living old coot to your left.

Now, the age-old question "What time is it Indiana right now?" (which had recently supplanted "I'm not going to pay a lot for this muffler" as America's favorite saying), is brought into much sharper relief. Now that EST has been standardized across abject swaths of land in Indiana, the short and succinct answer to that question is "I have no fucking clue." Take a gander at this map:

One important thing to note is that daylight savings time will not be observed by moving clocks forward and backwards an hour, as it is observed in the rest of the country. You see, due to backlash from the grizzled and gnarled old drunks that populate about 95% of these counties, the local civic governments have allowed for a "Graduated Phasing Observance" of Daylight Savings Time. Essentially, starting April 2, the counties will move their clocks forward 15 seconds every 8 hours for the first 90 days of DST, at which point they will begin moving their clocks back 15 seconds every eight hours.

So, by doing some simple calculus (and you thought you'd never use it again...), we can solve the integral of continuous time change for the days of Notre Dame's home football games. A little grunt work later, and voila, we have the first schedule of kickoff times that is guaranteed to be accurate.

Date	Opponent	Time (Central)
9/9/06	Penn State	2:46:29
9/16/06	Michigan	2:43:17
9/30/06	Purdue	1:37:41
10/7/06	Stanford	1:32:04
10/21/06	UCLA	1:28:15
11/4/06	North Carolina	1:26:51
11/18/06	Army	1:22:38

Be sure to plan your travel and football-watching schedule accordingly.