I would very much appreciate Tim's input on datetime issues.  This particular issue is fairly minor, but Tim's expertise will be invaluable for anything timezone related.  I do appreciate the incredible amount of brainpower that went into the design of datetime module and I think the result is very good.  There is only one thing that I would like to improve - eliminate the need to reach out to the time module when working with the datetime instances.  This patch is a small step to removing the dependency at the implementation level.