India straddles two time zones, so they split the difference and put the entire country at half past (it's 7:40 am here and 5:10 pm there). Nepal likes to be different so they're :15 ahead of India.

What was the question?

I've also heard that all of China is one time zone. It's geographically large enough to cover 6 time zones or something like that, but the whole country is on Beijing time. I just looked it up; it's GMT +8 hours.

:D
http://www.cuervo.com/images/Gateway_Bottles.jpg

We have a similar situation here in the US.

Cleveland is a step & a half behind the rest of the country.

(sorry, couldn't resist :p )

Isn't there a time zone in Canada that's a half hour ahead of Eastern Time?

Edited: Found it, it's Newfoundland, and it's an hour and a half ahead of US Eastern Time.

You've obviously never visited Geauga (gee-AW-guh) County, Ohio, where the signs read:
Welcome to Geauga County, please set your clocks back 50 years.

Still, Geauga County produces more maple syrup than the state of Vermont.

Wait, what was the question again?

That's true (they should have 5 time zones). Very convenient for the central bureaucrats in Beijing, but not so nice when you get up in Lhasa at 7 am and the sun still thinks it's 2 am.

Is this thread now about the question of what do you do when officiating a game on a cruise ship in which the ship crosses the international date line while you are conducting a 10 second back court count? :confused:

No, it's not. But, thanks for asking.

And, FWIW, I think the world should only have one time zone -- everyone should use GMT.

Go home, come back the next day, complete the count, collect for two days travel and per diem.

Doesn't the military call it zulu time or something like that? I think it stands for "zero meridian". BTW - recently there was an "Ask Marilyn" column in Parade Magazine that listed the dumbest questions she had received all year. One was from someone who wanted to know why, instead of moving clocks ahead and behind one hour for DST adjustment twice a year, didn't we just move all clocks ahead a half an hour once and just leave them there from now on since it would "balance out". :D

Communist!

That's why we fought the revolutionary war; to avoid heavy taxes and GMT.

Hmmm, I believe WE invented time zones. But perhaps we did it so we could assign ourselves something other than GMT. ;)

Now you're just arguing grammantics.
That's what I meant. :D

Argh! This is what is frustrating to non-Americans. The ISO format for timezones specifies that the TZ is Eastern. It is not called "US Eastern Time."

Actually, a US citizen proposed time zones for the US only. A Canadian proposed the system on a worldwide basis.