Eastern Standard Time

So here's something I just don't understand about living more or less close to the East Coast: prime time starting at 8pm. Do the people here stay up late? Or work late? Because they sure as hell don't get up to go to work late.

As you know, I've just recently relocated to lovely West Virginia from lovely Texas. Before this, I didn't know if I'd ever leave Texas. I had a nice job, some phenomenal apron strings which kept me miserably tied to my mother, & absolutely no idea why the hell I'd leave Austin except that the summers there were getting more & more unbearable & the hill country was slowly being desertified. Also, of course, the place was filling up with northerners. Carpetbaggers! Come to steal our women! Anyway.

"Central" & "Mountain" time has prime time start at 7pm, with the nightly news at the most reasonable hour of 10pm. This meant that funny talk shows can come on at 10:30 &, if you're a kid, say, in the 1980s, you can stay up to 11:30 to watch the first half hour of Letterman before you conk out. Imagine! I would never have gotten to see the Late Show if I grew up here, not just because electricity is a recent development here (just kidding Mountain State!) but also because it was on too late! A late Late Show would have sucked for a high school kid who had to be at school at 7:15am or else there'd be no parking spaces.

I remember thinking it was some sort of fictional conceit, like soda machines that say "Soda Machine" in the pre-product-placement days in movies & television, that people on TV would say "News at eleven." "It's not the real world," I would think. "So the news comes on at eleven." But no. It's true! The news comes on at eleven! What's up with that?

I just don't get it. Is it a daylight savings thing? Since television culture began in New York, I suppose it started then. Damn it, I've gotta go do research now. If you know, tell me. If not - I'll look it up.