Or we could just ditch the ridiculous system and keep to UTC.

Also, why does cron(1) work on local time anyway?

Well, you do want some kinds of cron job to be tied to local time, if the intention was to schedule them to run when people had gone home / gone to bed / whatever.

I'm reminded of the way that at(1) accepts 'teatime'. I don't know if this is preserving the memory of the departmental teabreak at Bell Labs or Berkeley...