Change the Time

Spring forward...Fall back....

It's ingrained in our consciousness almost as much as the A-B-Cs or our spelling reminder of "i before e...." And it's a regular event, though perhaps a bit less regular than the swallows coming back to Capistrano.

Yet in those four words is a whole collection of trivia, facts and common sense about Daylight Saving Time.

Beginning in 2007, Daylight Saving Time is extended one month and begins for most of the United States at:

2 a.m. on the Second Sunday in March

and lasts until

2 a.m. on the First Sunday of November.

The new start and stop dates were set in the Energy Policy Act of 2005.

Daylight Saving Time - for the U.S. and its territories - is NOT observed in Hawaii, American Samoa, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands, and by most of Arizona (with the exception of the Navajo Indian Reservation in Arizona).

Daylight Saving Time Saves Energy

One of the biggest reasons we change our clocks to Daylight Saving Time (DST) is that it reportedly saves electricity. Newer studies, however, are challenging long-held reason.

In general, energy use and the demand for electricity for lighting our homes is directly connected to when we go to bed and when we get up. Bedtime for most of us is late evening through the year. When we go to bed, we turn off the lights and TV.

In the average home, 25 percent of all the electricity we use is for lighting and small appliances, such as TVs, VCRs and stereos. A good percentage of energy consumed by lighting and appliances occurs in the evening when families are home. By moving the clock ahead one hour, we can cut the amount of electricity we consume each day.

Daylight Saving Time "makes" the sun "set" one hour later and therefore reduces the period between sunset and bedtime by one hour. This means that less electricity would be used for lighting and appliances late in the day. We may use a bit more electricity in the morning because it is darker when we rise, but that is usually offset by the energy savings in the evening.

In the winter, the afternoon Daylight Saving Time advantage is offset by the morning's need for more lighting. In spring and fall, the advantage is less than one hour. So, Daylight Saving Time saves energy for lighting in all seasons of the year except for the four darkest months of the year (November, December, January and February) when the afternoon advantage is offset by the need for lighting because of late sunrise.

History of Daylight Saving Time

Daylight Saving Time is a change in the standard time of each time zone. Time zones were first used by the railroads in 1883 to standardize their schedules. According to the The Canadian Encyclopedia Plus by McClelland & Stewart Inc., Canada's "[Sir Sandford] Fleming also played a key role in the development of a worldwide system of keeping time. Trains had made obsolete the old system where major cities and regions set clocks according to local astronomical conditions. Fleming advocated the adoption of a standard or mean time and hourly variations from that according to established time zones. He was instrumental in convening an International Prime Meridian Conference in Washington in 1884 at which the system of international standard time -- still in use today -- was adopted.”

Daylight Saving Time has been around for most of this century and even earlier.

Benjamin Franklin, while a minister to France, first suggested the idea in an essay titled "An Economical Project for Diminishing the Cost of Light." The essay was first published in the Journal de Paris in April 1784. But it wasn't for more than a century later that an Englishman, William Willett, suggested it again in 1907.

In 1918, in order to conserve resources for the war effort, the U.S. Congress placed the country on Daylight Saving Time for the remainder of WW I. It was observed for seven months in 1918 and 1919. The law, however, proved so unpopular that it was later repealed.

When America went to war again, Congress reinstated Daylight Saving Time on February 9, 1942. Time in the U.S. was advanced one hour to save energy. It remained advanced one hour forward year-round until September 30, 1945.

From 1945 to 1966, there was no U.S. law about Daylight Saving Time. So, states and localities were free to observe Daylight Saving Time or not.

This, however, caused confusion -- especially for the broadcasting industry, and for trains and buses. Because of the different local customs and laws, radio and TV stations and the transportation companies had to publish new schedules every time a state or town began or ended Daylight Saving Time.

By 1966, some 100 million Americans were observing Daylight Saving Time through their own local laws and customs. Congress decided to step in end the confusion and establish one pattern across the country. The Uniform Time Act of 1966 (15 U.S. Code Section 260a) created Daylight Saving Time to begin on the last Sunday of April and to end on the last Sunday of October. Any area that wanted to be exempt from Daylight Saving Time could do so by passing a local ordinance. We’ve Had DST in one form or another ever since.

Classic Halloween Movies

If you’re like me you want to take in a couple of classic horror films around this time of year.  I’ve compiled a list of some of my GO TO movies that never get old.  Hope you like them.

The Shining, 1980

What's scarier than a haunted house? Try a haunted hotel. Stanley Kubrick's 1980 film centers on the young Torrance family — writer dad Jack (Jack Nicholson), homemaker mom Wendy (Shelley Duvall) and clairvoyant son Danny (Danny Lloyd) — who've taken on the task of caring for the remote Overlook Hotel in Colorado during the off-season. However, isolated in the snowed-in location, it isn't long before cabin fever and writer's block (not to mention the hotel's ghosts) begin to drive Jack murderously insane. Despite being markedly different from the Stephen King novel it was adapted from, The Shining is widely considered to be one of the scariest movies of all time, full of creepy twin girls, decaying corpse ladies, blood-spewing elevators and one hell of a hedge maze.

The Haunting, 1963

It's no surprise that a movie based on one of the best haunted house tales ever written (The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson) would be this good. A scientist and two women with psychic gifts visit an evil-looking mansion named Hill House, a place where everything is just slightly wrong, where the angles at which walls meet are off by half a degree, so that doors are always closing on their own. The trio is accompanied by the skeptical young heir to Hill House. As directed by Robert Wise (who had a delightfully diverse career, helming movies from The Sound of Music and West Side Story to the first Star Trek film, as well as being the editor on Citizen Kane), The Haunting perfectly demonstrates the power of suggestion. We never see any ghosts. We hear them — banging, giggling, crying behind walls. We feel them. But they always remain just on the other side of the door. Which is where they are scariest. For the second after we first see the thing is the second at which the fear begins to fade.

Poltergeist, 1982

The brilliance of Poltergeist isn't in its special effects or its Steven Spielberg-branded movie magic. It's in the film's mundaneness. The Freeling family home is an ordinary house inside an ordinary suburban community. The characters aren't overly likable, special or interesting. The Freelings could be any typical American family. Therein lies the terror. While the film lends itself to some wonderfully quotable moments, it also brought the good old fashioned haunting into the modern suburban home. As the Freelings got sucked into closets and harassed by electronics, audience members began to glance suspiciously at their own TVs, and white noise began a reign of terror that reached its apex with 2002's The Ring.

The Lost Boys, 1987

"Sleep all day. Party all night. Never grow old. Never die. It's fun to be a vampire." That says it all! This one is just plain fun. The cast features Kiefer Sutherland as a punky teen vampire, Jason Patric as the newest reluctant convert, and the two Coreys (Haim and Feldman). Feldman plays one of two wacky brothers (Edgar and Allen) who insist the town is crawling with vampires. They made the phrase "vamp out" famous.

The Evil Dead, 1981

Filmmaker Sam Raimi first hacked his way to notoriety with 1981's The Evil Dead. The film follows a band of students on a weekend getaway to a rickety Tennessee mountain cabin, where they plan for the typical sex and booze-type debauchery. Unfortunately for them, the gang encounters a group of demons and quickly realize these are no idle spooks. Even the forest greenery is under their control. (Is it possible for a tree to be misogynist? Watch and find out.) The gore fest, in which all the usual horror appliances get ample screen time (by film's end, the dagger, ax, chainsaw and shotgun get more than their share of screen time), was widely criticized as too gruesome by critics and theaters alike, which only seemed to hasten the audience's desire to watch the corn syrup flow.

The Others, 2001

Grace (Nicole Kidman) is alone with her kids. Stuck in a giant, fog-shrouded manor on the British isle of Jersey during World War II, Grace can't leave because her son and daughter suffer from extreme sensitivity to sunlight. She's isolated and anxious. But Grace and her kids are not alone, because there's something with them in the house. Kidman shines as a mother incapable of connecting to her kids, a mother who hides her fragility behind a stern countenance. The film begins with Kidman shrieking loudly and near the end, she breaks down in hysterics. The Others is as affecting as it is chilling.

Nosferatu the Vampire, 1922

Let's start at the beginning with F.W. Murnau's silent film featuring the creepiest looking vampire ever -- Max Schreck. Rumors at the time of the film circulated that the strange looking Schreck was indeed a real vampire. That became the inspiration for the film Shadow of the Vampire. But you can decide for yourself.

Arachnophobia, 1990

Spiders. John Goodman with a blowtorch. Who's scarier? I'm sure we could ask Roseanne, but that's the subject of a much more frightening movie. Anyway, as anyone who has ever squashed a spider can attest, things with eight legs are creepy. Gross. Big ones that fly through the air when provoked? Even worse.

Amityville Horror, 1978

A family moves into a perfectly nice house in Amityville, N.Y. Then things begin to happen: black goo comes out of the toilet, flies appear (does this have anything to do with the toilet?), a voice tells a priest to "get out," and something with glowing red eyes peers through the windows at night. Sure it was an "Exorcist" rip-off, but it was "based on a true story!" That's got to count for something.

The Exorcist, 1973

Spinning heads. Vile expletives. Buckets of vomit. Sound like your last blind date? It was worse for Ellen Burstyn and Max Von Sydow, who had to play opposite Linda Blair in "The Exorcist." When this puppy first hit the silver screen, people were running out of the theater in droves. Now we call those people sissies. But as approximately 6,453 previous "Scariest Movies of All Time" lists have noted, this movie is scary.

Also something you will want to check out and if it's not a tradition like watching classic Halloween movies, you may want to make it one.  Go to Universal's Halloween Horror Nights!!  Definately worth the fright! 

See if yu can beat the odds and survive Halloween Horror Nights 21 at Universal Studio Florida.  Test your luck at 8 all-new haunted houses, 6 electrifying scare zones, 2 outrageous live shows and more!  But be careful what you wager - because at Halloween Horror Nights 21 nobody beats the house!