Last night we were supposed to observe Earth Hour, I know. Lights out from 8:30 to 9:30...  Why? Because nothing's on at that time anyway.

Earth Hour was a simple, compelling idea -- simpler than my idea to impose, then take away, an extra hour of daylight savings time each weekend -- and according to news reports was "successful." Indeed, it would be good for everyone (except television networks) if we turned everything off from 8:30 to 9:30 every night. (You notice they didn't propose doing it on Thursdays, because I doubt you'd get many Americans to skip Comedy Night on NBC.)

When I heard about the event, I remembered Thanksgiving of 1996. We had been in our house for just a year and had friends and family over for the holiday meal. We had already finished eating, but everyone was still talking around the table when the lights went out at about 9:00 pm. A quick look out the window revealed that it was, at least, a neighborhood-wide blackout. "Thanks for dinner, bye," said all our guests. By candlelight we put all the dishes in the kitchen sink, then my wife drew a bath and bathed by candlelight while I sat listening to the radio. An All-Beatles-All-the-Time radio station -- a short-lived enterprise, but one that happened to be in business that month -- was playing. It was really a very peaceful way to end Thanksgiving Day.

Perhaps that's what the organizers of Earth Hour envisioned: people sitting quietly after dinner by candlelight, talking hopefully about ways to save the planet. But it didn't work out that way for us last night.

My wife invited a friend over and planned to cook chiles rellenos. She'd cooked them a couple times before and it had gone all right, but last night, everything went wrong, chief among which was that the broiler decided to stop working. The two of them wound up roasting the chiles over the open flame on the stove, that was the high point. Due to the broiler malfunction and other problems, the job of cooking took the two of them three hours. Earth Hour passed during the middle of this debacle, but I decided it would be more prudent not to suggest they make their task even more difficult by trying to do it by candlelight. (Yes, I was helping -- I was cleaning up behind them as they went.) But at least the broiler had gone dark.