The annual Daylight Savings Time rant

For most of us here in North America, tonight marks the night when the clocks get turned back one hour. For me here in the Eastern Time Zone, that means I'm going from UTC-4 to UTC-5, Universal Time being a worldwide standard such that it's easy to figure out time differences by seeing what the offset is in two different locations. So if you think of Sydney, Australia as being in UTC+11 now that they're in the summer, we're simply 16 hours behind them and that way you don't have to worry about whether you gain or lose a day when you cross the International Date Line.

In and of itself, that's no big deal. But when it comes to programming a television lineup, there always seems to be problems. Things are easy when you have to fill one 24-hour day after another, but when you get either the 23-hour day (in March) or the 25-hour day (today, if you consider that TCM's programming day begins at 6AM), glitches happen.

It doesn't help that TCM redesigned its website and schedule some time back, removing shorts from the on-line schedule. That's where the problem comes in, at least in trying to figure out what's going to fill that 25th hour. TCM's online schedule, as well as my DirecTV box guide, has The Andromeda Strain starting at the first 1:45 AM Eastern, or 0545 UTC. The movie runs 127 minutes, but is being put in a 3:15 time slot, with the next feature, Coma, starting at 4:00 AM Eastern or 0900 UTC.

That means there's a little over an hour that isn't accounted for. If I had to guess, I suppose they'll show the 1949 Some of the Best that seems to have shown up other years when the clock switched back. But I have no way of knowing, since TCM doesn't seem to release that information any more. My DirecTV guide has the extra hour built in, while a service like TitanTV doesn't, so the three-day view of TCM looks like a 127-minute movie in a 2:15 slot.

FXM has actually done better in this regard. They've got back-to-back airings of some movie called Alita: Battle Angel. They're both in a 140-minute slot, with the first one being at 10:00 PM tonight and the second at 12:20 AM. As you can probably figure, that goes past the time at which clocks change back, at least in the Eastern time zone, so at the second 1:40 AM (now 0640 UTC) we get a movie called Black Water which leads us up to the FXM Retro block. TitanTV has the second showing of Alita in a 1:20 slot, although I'd guess that's partly down to the difficulty of displaying a three-day grid for days of different length. The more standard grid with all the channels shows the second airing of Alita in an 80-minute block and Black Water in a 3:20 slot.