Maybe I shouldn't have started this blog now, not with everything that's been going on.

Second weekend in a row I’m technically “reviewing” films. I wonder if this is a trend.

Last Tuesday I also watched three VHS tapes submitted by my students from cable channel shows about astronomy. I did this while also checking my 1250pm class' first exam papers. Talk about multitasking.

The first was narrated by a strangely subdued William Shatner (although the Star Trek similar music should have been a give away). I only realized it was him during the credits. It was the oldest of the three, and did not have that many good visuals, a sign of pre CG animation effort. Besides, Shatner was speaking in an unimpressive, unimpactful monotone.

The second had great visuals, but had a depressing overall tone because they talked about the super black hole in the center of the galaxy one day deciding our fate, and if that doesn't destroy the Solar System, the collision of The Milky Way with the Andromeda galaxy will either drive us toward the center of galaxy or fling us out into deep space. Lastly, they also showed the final days of our Sun, when it will expand as a red supergiant and engulf the Earth.

As a bonus there was part of a local Weakest Link episode at the end of the tape where the male action stars battled it out. Caloocan Mayor Rey Malonzo won.

The third tape had Stephen Hawking discussing Cosmic Alchemy. It goes through the historical development of the discoveries in the composition of matter. What’s nice about it is that it goes through pseudo-reenactments for visuals while relating the experiments of the scientists. For example, they first interview the granddaughter of Marie Curie about her grandmother. Then, when they talk about the steps involved in how Madame Curie discovered radium, the granddaughter is shown tinkering in the lab retracing her grandmother’s steps. When they talked about Rutherford, they showed a recent college graduate whose hobby is to scour junkyards recreating Rutherford’s experiment. When they talked about Mendeleyev, they interviewed a Russian scientist who “doubled” as Mendeleyev, not only having worked in the same institute, but also because of the accent.

Unfortunately, it is likely to be more appreciated by the majors who have taken their fourth fundamental course, rather than by those only taking up their science elective. At least I was able to talk about it to one of my co-faculty who does teach that subject to the majors, so he is now thinking of using it for a class film showing.

There was one more program in the tape, but I haven’t finished watching it. In fact, I only viewed the first few minutes before I turned it off and postponed seeing its entirety for another time. It’s about alien abductions.