Dan’s Papers March 18, 2011 danspapers.com Page 17
Mickey Mouse Rules Town to Follow the Corporate Policies of Walt Disney World By Dan Rattiner Everybody in the Hamptons is getting really cranky this month. Winter is not quite over. Money is tight. Everybody is worried about their jobs. Are we going to have another blizzard? We had three. Tornado? We had one last summer. Tsunami? None yet. But you better keep an eye out. So tempers are short. Last week, we had the Southampton Town Highway Superintendent yelling publicly at the Town Supervisor telling her the potholes were his business, not hers. She replied that that was her business and the superintendent was supposed to report to her.
In Montauk, everybody is up in arms about the proposed solution to the summer ice cream wagon turf wars about who gets to park at which beaches. The plan is to have the ice cream wagon people bid on the sites at an auction next month, with beginning bids starting at $4,000 and going up from there. It’s another tax and tax and tax program to get revenue for the town, said a concerned citizen. And it’s something new. There has never been a charge for locations before. Will the small ice cream wagon people be driven out of business? Others fears that the truck spot at East Lake Beach won’t get any bids and so won’t have any service at all.
In East Hampton Village this week, the village board began to consider a ban on smoking in our parks, beaches and just outside the entrances of the municipal buildings. Those not having death wishes should not have to walk through the smoke of those who do. And in East Hampton Town, the municipality in which the Village sits, the Supervisor there wants to crack down on the number of cars parked in the driveways of private homes. There are already laws on the books about this. It’s time to take them seriously. Maybe even to reduce the numbers. (continued on page 20)
ADJUST TIME HOW? IS IT FALL DOWN, SPRING UP? By Dan Rattiner I look across the room to the little clock on the mantelpiece over the bedroom fireplace. It’s 8:15 in the morning. Sunday morning. We can sleep late. I think, that’s nice, but this isn’t the usual time I wake up. Usually I wake up at 6:30. I go downstairs, make coffee, take out my laptop and quietly write awhile. She usually gets up around eight. Was I really that tired to sleep until 8:15? We hadn’t gone to bed all that late. Hmmm. I quietly get up and go into the bathroom and brush my teeth. I turn on the little radio there, keeping the sound down low. There’s more news about the nuclear problems in Japan. It’s late in the afternoon there, the announcer says. You can see the steam being emitted from one of the reactors. I return to bed and snuggle up with my wife spoon fashion to gently wake her. 8:15 is not far off from when she wakes up. Now we’ll start the day together. “What time is it?” she asks. She’s still got her
eyes closed. “8:15,” say I. “So says the clock.” “No. I mean with Daylight Savings Time.” I had forgotten. “Then it’s 7:15,” I said. “Sorry I woke you.” That explains things, I thought. I’m up. She’s not. “Sleep a bit more,” say I. “Okay,” says she. But I liked the snuggling up with her, so I don’t move away. We had discussed which way the clocks move the night before, when we were driving home from dinner in Southampton. I had argued we move the clocks back. She had argued we move them forward. I don’t know. I was pretty tired by that time. Outside, it was nearly freezing. There was a wind. Seemed like fall. Looked like fall in the dark there. “It’s fall back,” she said. “And spring forward.” I’d had one drink. That’s all it takes. I get very witty. “I thought it was fall down and spring up,” said I. We continued on. I thought, we move the clocks back. That was that.
Now I thought, well, that explains all this morning confusion. It happened in the night. I’d missed it. All the clocks will have to be reset. I thought about all the clocks in the house. Most of them have a little battery in the back, so all you have to do is push the little hand back an hour. We have an old electric clock on a mantelpiece in the living room though. It bongs the hour. It does it very slowly, like Big Ben in London, bong…bong…bong. It’s no problem setting the clock forward. You just open the glass door and slowly wind the big hand fully around once. It bongs the extra hour as it passes 12. What does it know? Setting it back is a pain, though. You have to pull its plug for an hour, then plug it back in. If you forget, it’s a bigger problem. I love that old clock. There’s a little wooden door on the back you can open to look at the gears. There’s a label on the inside of the door that reads American Clock Company. Under it is a lightning bolt and the words Fully Electrified. It must have been made just after they invented (continued on next page)