Is that intended as humor or sarcasm? I cant tell.
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A solution turned out to be quite easy once I stopped thinking about setting the time and and googled for running a process on startup up instead.
For anyone interested, my solution was to create an 'autostart.sh' file and add the command: date -s '1980-01-01 12:00:00'
It wouldn't work with 1970, but as I was more interested in having the time starting at 12, this works for my purposes.
Info on autostart.sh found here: Autostart.sh - OpenELEC