If I were Queen of the Land, a lot of things would be so.
I would take my Royal Scepter and make them so.
You all know the usual suspects in this. Equality for all. Health care for all. Human choices for all humans. And all.
Those decrees would be made on my first day. Hands down. People near me would have to keep ducking, as I would be swinging that scepter to and fro as I decreed this and decreed that.
But two things, further down on my list, would be:
No more Daylight Savings Time.
No more Christopher Columbus Day.
First things first. Let’s shed a light on it.
People argue for Daylight Savings Time, saying it extends the amount of daylight hours for work for the farmers, they say. It does no such things. It just “shifts” the time to later in the day. It makes it light outside until 10 p.m. I don’t know a lot of people who still like to work at 10 p.m. Nope. The workers I know, the farmers I know, like to get an early start on things. Early bird gets the worm, and so on. I say “Pshaw” to DST. The only thing it does is make it later for partying. And drunk people don’t typically care if it is dark or not. In fact, most of them would probably rather it be dark.
Besides all that. DST makes people sick. An uptick in heart attacks is caused by DST.
So I would ban it completely. Keep standard time where it belongs. On our clocks.
Item number two. Christopher Columbus.
By now, anyone who isn’t under a rock realizes that Christopher Columbus did not discover any part of the United States. So why do we continue to celebrate this dude?
First the facts. Just like the old poem says, in 1492 Christopher Columbus did sail the ocean blue. Sort of. That wasn’t his real name, but I’ll get to that in a minute. Back to the sailing. His voyages took place in 1492, 1493, 1498, and 1502. He never made it, not even once, to the continental United States. He really only explored a small area of the Caribbean—which included the Bahamas, Cuba, and Jamaica—and parts of Central America.
His boats were not named Niña, Pinta, and Santa Maria. At least two of those were likely nicknames. In Columbus’s time, it was the custom in Spain to name ships after saints and to call them by nicknames instead. La Niña was likely a nickname for a ship called Santa Clara. It is unknown what the Pinta’s original name might have been. But. Santa Maria is a perfectly saintly name for the third. Holy High Seas, Batman.
As for his real name? In Italian he is known as Cristoforo Colombo. In Spanish as Cristóbal Colón. But he has also been referred to, by himself and others, as Christoual, Christovam, Christofferus de Colombo, and even Xpoual de Colón. There is even a theory that he adopted the name from a pirate named Colombo.
Regardless of this information, Columbus should be voted out of America’s lives. We may as well celebrate Marco Polo Day. Or Willem Janszoon Day.
So. If I ever get the “Queen” gig, be confident you will see these two items on my early agenda.
But first, we’ll have to live through Trump’s re-election. Then his morph into Dictator King of America.
From there, I’ll try to “posse up” my band of merry men to overthrow him.
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Royalty is completely different than celebrity. Royalty has a magic all its own.
— Philip Treacy
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In the past, people were born royal. Nowadays, royalty comes from what you do.
— Gianni Versace
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Humility is royalty without a crown.
— Spencer W. Kimball
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Queen for a day. Or a whole bunch of days.
