"That's a very nice rendering, Dave. I think you've improved a great deal. Can you hold it a bit closer?"

Has it been a year already?

I started this blog on March 7, 2010. More accurately, I rebooted it from its previous incarnation (having undergone something of a reboot myself). I started it as a casual, when-the-mood-hits-me "mostly movies" blog, an extension of the part of my personal and professional self that's a longtime film buff, one who has for years written about movies for fun and profit. To that extent it has been an agreeable sideline and a pleasurable conduit for getting to know several of you.

This is the 171st post, making an average of 3.28846154 posts per week.

According to Blogger's referrer logs, monthly readership has steadily grown toward last month's peak of 6,801 pageviews, a fourfold increase from a year ago.

Blogger reports that the top 10 posts according to pageview hits are:

1. Some Like It Hot (1959) — The sweet end of the lollipop
2. When Worlds Collide (1951) — Apocalypse Whoa
3. The Time Machine (2002) — Dishwater: 10, Wells: 0
4. Alternate universe movies: Alfred Hitchcock's "The War of the Worlds"
5. Blazing Saddles (1974) — Excuse me while I whip this out
6. Our Man Flint (1966) and In Like Flint (1967) — double-naught spoofs
7. Freaks (1932): Sex and the single freak
8. The Time Machine (1960) — Taking you where you want to go
9. To Kill a Mockingbird (1962) — Another man's skin
10. Scenes I love: Charlie Chaplin's science fiction movie (from "Modern Times")

The Blogger stats don't reveal the next ten, though I suspect they would include these posts (some I would have thought would be in the top ten) given their hit-count frequency:

• Fantastic Voyage (1966) — Navel maneuvers; or, Sailing your inner lava lamp
• Happy 90th birthday, Ray Bradbury — A bit about Mr. B and me
• Forbidden Planet (1956) — such stuff as...
• Backbeat (1994) — There are places I remember...
• The Man in the White Suit (1951) — One perfectly poured Guinness, please
• The President's Analyst (1967) — spy vs. spy, repeat as necessary

By a wide margin, most of you are accessing this site from the U.S., followed in order by the U.K., Canada, Germany, Denmark, Netherlands, Australia, France, Brazil, and Spain.

Thanks for visiting, for reading, and for writing. I'm having a good enough time that chances are we'll be looking back to this post a year from now to see what has changed. There are plenty more movies to go.

A year already. Huh.