Infospigot: The data
At first, I thought Infospigot (the origin of the name: an early-morning rant a decade or so ago to the San Francisco Examiner copy desk) would be about all the things I look up every day (a couple of today's examples: A. Has Nashville, Tennessee, switched time zones since December 1973? B. Which Red Sox player hit the fly ball that in a 1982 game with the White Sox led to centerfielder Ron LeFlore being charged with a four-base error?) But neither I nor my "site" are focused enough for that. You see the result.
But any moment can be an Information Spigot moment. As to the queries above:
B. Gary Allenson. There's a story in it. Details later.
A. I don't know. But I have an interest because someone in the newsroom asked whether Nashville is in the Eastern or Central zone. I said Eastern, going back to a night in December 1972 when I was driving through Nashville with my brothers and two friends, and we all had a very good reason to be preoccupied with the time. But the answer is Central. Have the time-zone boundaries changed there in the interim. Not likely, but possible. The closest I got to an answer was an archive published by a federal government computer scientist; it mentioned changes in other states, but not Tennessee. Along the way, I found out that the time zones are set by act of Congress and that the Department of Transportation actually administers the zones.
Time for bed, PST.
11:31:29 PM 
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