Less is More -- One Hour Less of the Apocalypse

THE BEST THING ABOUT LOSING AN HOUR TODAY?

ONE HOUR LESS OF THIS GUY!!!

YES, JUST ONE HOUR OUT OF ANOTHER 3 YEARS AND 11 MONTHS, BUT I'LL TAKE IT!!!

Photos: from timeanddate.com and from msn.com

A Few Things

Just a few things I need to point out.  Minor things that have accumulated over time:

--A hearty THANK YOU (that's right, I shouted that out) to all 10 of my beta-readers.  You guys rock!  I owe you, big-time.  I won't forget the kindness that you've been showing me the last week +.

--If you like a blog entry, or if you just want to help me out, please mention it on your media, or like it, or comment, or something.  Any of that is supremely appreciated!

--I cannot accept comments from Anonymous.  I have very good reasons for this.  Commenting is really, really appreciated, but please leave your name or avatar (preferably, both), or I'll have to press DELETE when I go over the submitted comments.

--Please comment anytime, on any blog entry, even if it's not a contest.  Your comments are very important to me, for many reasons!

--If you don't want to leave a comment, but want to say something or enter a contest, please feel free to email me--but not anonymously!  (A surprising number prefer doing this.)

--Please remember that I have many blogs, the most important (to me, anyway) being this one and my published works blog.  Please visit them!  All of the tabs are above.

--I should read the blogs more of people who follow mine, read mine, add me to Google +, etc.  When you comment, it's okay if you remind me of this.  I'll get there, I promise.  And I comment on anything I can for my friends / followers / readers, etc. because I know how important that is.

Blog News

Dear Readers,

In the next few days, I will try a massive (in terms of time, anyway) undertaking: two new blogs, maybe three.  So in addition to this site and my sports blog (where I babble mostly about baseball, baseball cards, and the sports world at large), please look at my American Horror Story: Coven blog, and my Walking Dead 4 blog, both via Blogger.  If they're not up when you check, please come back.  I'll put up the American Horror Story: Coven blog first, since the season's first episode has already aired.  Walking Dead 4's blog will go up tonight, or tomorrow--most likely tomorrow.

I may also start a blog, tentatively titled Steve's Sales, that will contain photos, descriptions and prices of things I want to sell.  This would be via Blogger as well.  So take a peek at that, when it's up, and let me know what strikes your fancy.  Just send me an email at the address on the top of any of my blogs, and I'll get back to you ASAP. 

As always, thanks for taking the time to peruse my meager scribblings.  I hope my readers, friends and followers like what is to come.

Sincerely,

Steven E. Belanger

Super 8

Photo: Movie poster, from its Wikipedia site

See this movie on cable for the story, the emotion, the great framed shots, the special effects, and the film nostalgia. It pays homage, in ways small and large, to the following films:

--E.T.

--Close Encounters

--The Thing (the original, according to Roger Ebert's 3 1/2 star review; I only saw Carpenter's 1982 film version)

--The Goonies

--The Blob (bad 80s version)

--Aliens

--Every teenage schmaltzy 80s movie with a girl with a bad father.  Say Anything comes to mind here.  So does Forrest Gump (I know that's a 90s film), but in a much different way.

--Every schmaltzy 50s movie with a town taken over by an alien, and the army takes over, and there's a professor (called "perfessor") somewhere, acting goofy.

--The Abyss

--The Stand (Okay, that's a miniseries, but still very much there)

--Every so-bad-it's-good zombie movie, including Night of the Living Dead

--Independence Day

This movie, essentially, is a combination, mostly, of The Goonies, E.T. and Close Encounters, with an alien that's a little Aliens, a little Independence Day, and a little Close Encounters (with the boy at the end) and a little Starman, too, I suppose.  And, of course, all he wants to do is get back home, like E.T.  But he strings up townspeople for food, a la Aliens, and kills quite a few of them, and the Air Force guys (usually in movies like this, they're Army guys), a la Aliens, and The Thing, but without the paranoia and Cold War social discourse.

I could re-write this blog entry and come up with a completely different homage-summary, and still be correct with that, too.  In fact, I have to throw in a tiny bit of Jaws, for the community-meeting thing run by the sheriff, and, now that I think about it, a tiny bit of Red Dawn and The Thing, because a woman stands up at this meeting and insists that the recent power outages and power-source thefts were due to "the Soviets."

I wonder if teens today would enjoy this as much as folks my age, and older.  I think they might--but not as much.  Too bad for them.  For God's sake, finally something good comes with getting older.