NavList:
A Community Devoted to the Preservation and Practice of Celestial Navigation and Other Methods of Traditional Wayfinding
Re: A question about an Alan Jackson song
From: Stan K
Date: 2018 Nov 14, 20:11 -0500
From: Stan K
Date: 2018 Nov 14, 20:11 -0500
Sean,
Your observation about the drink called a "Hurricane" being invented in the 1940s certainly ties the time of the song to a time where standard "civil" time zones were in use (although I cannot find a date when Newfoundland chose to be at UTC-3:30). But this exercise is based on a song that was released in 2003, so I have to believe the writer thought in terms of time zones. In fact, from a Wikipedia article, "The lyrics include the phrase, "It's only half-past twelve but I don't care. It's five o'clock somewhere", which means that even though it is not five o'clock in the narrator's time zone, it must be in another part of the world."
"...in the narrator's time zone..." The author of this article apparently was thinking in terms of time zones, not local times.
This is almost as much fun as when I determined whether high noon could have occurred at 12 noon in the movie "High Noon".
Stan
-----Original Message-----
From: Sean C <NoReply_SeanC@fer3.com>
To: slk1000 <slk1000@aol.com>
Sent: Wed, Nov 14, 2018 11:47 am
Subject: [NavList] Re: A question about an Alan Jackson song
From: Sean C <NoReply_SeanC@fer3.com>
To: slk1000 <slk1000@aol.com>
Sent: Wed, Nov 14, 2018 11:47 am
Subject: [NavList] Re: A question about an Alan Jackson song
I've thought about this phrase before after hearing it quoted by friends. (I never actually knew it was a song lyric, let alone which song it was from.) I always thought about it in terms of local time, as opposed to zone time.
The lyrics do state that it is July, but not what year it is. According to Wikipedia "By about 1900, almost all time on Earth was in the form of standard time zones, only some of which used an hourly offset from GMT. Many applied the time at a local astronomical observatory to an entire country, without any reference to GMT. It took many decades before all time on Earth was in the form of time zones referred to some "standard offset" from GMT/UTC."
The song also mentions a drink called a "Hurricane". This drink appears to have been invented sometime in the 1940s. So, I think it possible that is a wider range of areas where this time difference could have occured.
Of course, like I originally stated: if you go by local time even now, it is always five o'clock somewhere. :)
Cheers!
Sean C.
