Think it's been a long year? You are right

It's been a long year.

Literally.

You can tell a lot has gone on around McCook, with City Editor Lorri Sughroue's wrap-up of 2008 covering parts of the first three pages in today's edition. Then there was the presidential election and the financial meltdown.

But that's not what we're talking about.

The folks who keep track of time at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England, have decided to add a second to 2008 to make up for the slowing of the Earth's rotation.

As if 2008 weren't long enough already.

The problem is, unless Greenwich adds a second now and then, as it has since 1972, noon won't arrive until 1 p.m., when the sun will be exactly overhead.

That's in about a thousand years or so.

So what, say the folks over at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures near Paris, who keep track of time using atomic clocks that are much more accurate than the sun.

Besides, the French think the British have had control over the world's clocks for far too long, anyway.

But with everything from GPS to cell phones, computer networks and power grids depending on accurate time, it's more than just an academic question or national rivalry. You may even have one of those self-setting time clocks that take their cue from Coordinated Universal Time broadcasts.

Technicians at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Boulder, Colo., expect to be very busy working out the bugs today.

The American Astronomical Society is officially neutral on the idea of dropping Greenwich Mean Time and its leap second in favor of atomic time, but living in an agricultural area, we tend to favor the current system.

For someone who makes a living from the land, there's something reassuring about being able to look at the position of the sun to know when it's time to eat.