[Adam]: But the documentation says, and the code suggests, that the result should be noon today (in the default time zone, which is wherever your computer happens to be) No, the documentation just says "noon". It doesn't say anything about whether it's using the system default or something else - which means
you should really consider this to be unspecified and therefore unreliable. Looking at the source code, it seems that "noon" means noon GMT, not noon local time. Which translates into 6:00 AM in your current time zone. (Hello from Boulder, by the way.)