IT'S NOT JUST A MATTER OF TIME

In conflict-filled Iran, the government has gone on and off observing daylight saving time, depending on regime changes.

In Russia, Stalin imposed daylight saving one spring but forgot to officially end it in the fall; terrorized civilians didn't go back to standard time for more than 60 years.

Canada gives every province the right to determine whether it will observe daylight saving. Canadian citizens, being amenable, have gone along with whatever the United States is doing.

"The only people who adopted daylight savings and never wavered from schedule are the British," says Michael Downing, author of "Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time." Staying the course and all. Those dependable, reliable Brits.

The diverse United States hasn't managed to get on a national page for time changes: Mavericks in Arizona don't observe it at all. Hawaii doesn't, either. The swing state Indiana, where time zones change by county, passed legislation in 2005 that every county would participate in daylight saving.

What these time change wars are really all about, of course, is a sense of control. Over our daily schedules, over our national identity and, in the bigger sense, over the one thing that waits for no man. We cannot stop the march of time, but we can stop clocks, even wind them back an hour once a year.

"The entire idea of daylight savings is at best theoretical, or possibly philosophical," Downing says. "The idea that we can save time or lose time by moving its measuring device is preposterous."

Almost as preposterous as the idea of someone dying for time.

Back in 1999, terrorists on the daylight-saving West Bank built several time bombs, delivered to co-conspirators in Israel and scheduled to explode at a set time. Problem was, Israel had just switched back to standard time, so the only people injured were the terrorists themselves when the bomb detonated an hour earlier than they expected and killed them all.