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From: mark@bdblues.inria.fr (Mark James)
Newsgroups: comp.std.internat
Subject: Re: International time zones
Summary: More zones
Message-ID: <1389@inria.inria.fr>
Date: 28 Aug 89 14:24:21 GMT
References: <993@ks.UUCP> <383@shodha.dec.com> <1043@riddle.UUCP> <89Aug22.153031edt.10647@neat.cs.toronto.edu> <392@shodha.dec.com>
Sender: news@inria.inria.fr
Reply-To: mark@bdblues.altair.fr
Organization: GIP ALTAIR,c/o INRIA, Rocquencourt, FRANCE
Lines: 27

The time zone lists that people have been posting seem to ignore the
fact that there are at least 26 hours going at any one time.  Consider:

     New Zealand Daylight Savings Time     Z+13
     Tonga Standard Time                   Z+13

(Or, in devine@shodha.dec.com (Bob Devine)'s `official' terms, -13.)

The latter case is especially interesting.  The Kingdom of Tonga
covers three island chains that sprawl on either side of the 180th
meridian; although the bulk of the territory, and nearly all of the
population, is east of 180, the Date Line was bent to the east so that
Tonga would have the same day as its chief trading partners in the
then mainly British South Pacific.  Tonga is officially Methodist,
because the king is, but there is a sizeable Mormon minority.  Now
Mormons celebrate their Sabbath on Saturday, which was unacceptable to
the very devout king; so the Mormon church in Tonga simply declared
the bend in the Date Line null and void, so that their Saturday
corresponded with everyone else's Sunday.  Ah, the tropics...

Luckily, Tonga, being tropical, has no use for daylight savings time,
so there is (to my knowledge) no Z+14.

### T. Mark James           #### opinions, errors etc are my own ###
### mark@bdblues.altair.fr  #### "Sure, living in the future is like
### +33 (1) 39 63 53 93     ####  having bees live in your head.
################################  But, there they are..."