ON HURRICANES AND TIME ZONES, PART TWO
No one to whom I ranted ever took my side. They all nodded to indulge me, and I got the impression I had taken my obsession with accuracy in lyrics too far. No one else cared about the fallacy of this lyric in the hit song:
IT’S ONLY HALF-PAST TWELVE, BUT I DON’T CARE
IT’S FIVE O’CLOCK SOMEWHERE
No one else cared that if it's 12:30 where I am, it's 4:30 somewhere and it's 5:30 somewhere, but it's not five o'clock anywhere. But honestly, it would have been an easy fix for Mr. Jackson’s songwriters. It could have been written like this, and then it would have been accurate:
IT’S ONLY JUST TURNED TWELVE, BUT I DON’T CARE
IT’S FIVE O’CLOCK SOMEWHERE
That would have solved it all. But record sales continued, and time passed. Other songs took over the charts. My rants subsided. Years went by.
Then one night, my husband and I were discussing some recent world events and decided to consult an atlas to get a visual image of the countries involved. (Okay, admittedly it was more of a remedial geography refresher course for me – thank heavens my fella retained all this information from high school). We were pouring over a map of the world, as he pointed out the geo-political implications of the recent events we’d been discussing.
While the map suited our purposes, I realized that it was really a map of time zones. All the countries of the world were color-coded for their different time zones and a notation of how many hours + or – from Greenwich time. My eye was drawn to a little splash of red nestled in amongst the brown and blue coastline of Canada. Why was this one island a different color from everything else in the vicinity? Squinting and looking closer, we found the notation that this was Newfoundland, where the time is “off” by half an hour.
This revelation blew my mind. I had never before known that there was any time zone that differed from Greenwich time by anything other than one-hour increments. Another look, and I saw that there are actually several little odd places sprinkled around the globe that are “off” by increments other than one hour.
But then, it really hit me: the significance of this revelation! With a few quick calculations and studying the map a bit more, it became clear that Mr. Jackson had it right, after all:
There is, indeed, a place where I can be ordering another drink at 12:30 in the afternoon and be able to sing the song with absolute truth. It’s cocktail time in Newfoundland! If I’m in California at 12:30 pm … then, in fact, it IS five o’clock somewhere.
My little lyricist heart is at peace now. Cheers!