OK, I consider myself provoked:

The Wikipedia article on the Equation of Time is most enlightening. It's not the wobbliness of the Earth's rotation on its axis: it's that the Earth's axis isn't at right angles to the plane of its orbit (which gives us summer and winter), and that the orbit's slightly elliptical (we're closest to the Sun around Christmas, which helps make Northern hemisphere winters milder). This may help explain my personal observation that the earliest dawn, longest day, and latest sunset happen in that order, over about a week; were we on solar time instead of mean time, these may or may not coincide.

.... that's Quite Enough for now.