the buzz log

Gain a day, lose an hour.

Leap Day was just about a week ago, and now people have another time adjustment to make. Sunday March 9 marks the return of a longer Daylight Saving Time for the U.S. Many won't be caught drowsy: Searches for "daylight savings time" spiked 289%,  pushing the term into the top 1,000 searches this week.

Who leads in the DST search track? Depend on the people of Colorado, Alabama, Washington, Oregon, and Washington, D.C.  to be the most likely to get to the church or brunch on time. Surprisingly, Arizona numbers among the top 20 states: Then again, while the Grand Canyon state and Hawaii don't change times, residents still have to reprogram their electronics' convenient automatic updates—not to mention taking later-than-usual calls from the outside world.

Technically, "daylight saving time" (as opposed to "savings") is the grammatically correct term, but a third of searchers know that. Clock watchers also have been tracking the change-over with queries like "spring forward time change 2008," "when does daylight savings time start" or the far more philosophical "when does time change."

More querulous notes have been struck about the whole concept: Witness online lookups like "daylight saving controversy," "daylight saving is a fake," and a handful of "daylight saving time wastes energy." That exasperated notion likely arose from The Wall Street Journal article on two economic professors who propose putting a kibosh on the whole time-shifting deal. Their study found Indiana households actually paid out an additional $8.6 million in electric bills: Costs from air conditioning and heating squandered the savings of using less light.

Then again, the same article referred to other studies that attributed less crime and traffic fatalities, and more playtime and boosted economy, to longer daylight hours. So, pay up and carpe diem lux.