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

Today in my two one-hour classes, because we are not going to meet on Friday (free day for the field trip) I told them the assignment of watching "Contact" on Saturday, which is showing on local television. Of course I also announced this in my Monday-Friday class two days ago.

It saves me the trouble of viewing it in class, which I'll probably allot now for "Apollo 13" sometime in the last third of the term.

On a side note, these are really the two best astronomy-related films I've viewed so far in terms of balance of science and drama, which is why I alternate between them. Distant seconds are "Space Cowboys" and "Deep Impact". Wish there were more.

I told them that people who had nights out that day would have to make the effort of looking for the video or the DVD because there will be a quiz about the movie on Monday.

To enhance their comprehension of the movie, I told them to look up the following terms before watching: SETI, Arecibo, VLA (Very Large Array), Right Ascension, Declination, Occam's Razor and the Einstein-Rosen Bridge.

From last term, these were the terms I had expected to discuss with them before showing the film in class. I'll see on Monday if letting them go into the recommended backgrounder by themselves instead of telling them will be just as fruitful.

But I did lay out for them a very frantic pivotal scene in the movie that may be going too fast for them to absorb completely. After all, they had already been spoiled to the plot when we discussed the star Vega in the constellation Lyra.

Right after Jodie Foster's character first hears the signal, she tells her companions, "Make me a liar." This is their cue to verify and authenticate the signal by eliminating man-mads sources like satellites and military bases.

When it had been verified that the signal was from Vega, it was also discredited because being a relatively nearby star, it was one of the first locations listened to. Besides, Vega is too young to support planets let alone life.

Maybe they're just visiting, someone else suggests. But they'll be bombarded by proto-planet debris, the first person counters.

Not if the're advanced enough to have photon torpedos, the second guy retorts.

I also clarified the faster than light travel talk that Jodie Foster and Matthew McConaughey had about her trip to Vega, that even though for her the trip would last four years while fifty would have passed here on Earth.

On the snippy side, one student informed me that the movie was just shown on cable the night before.

"Thank you," I said. "You're prepared for the quiz on Monday then."

"No, sir. I didn't watch it."

"Did anyone watch the movie on cable last night?" I asked the class. No one raised their hand.

I resisted the temptation of telling him his information was therefore useless. ""

Another student, who also usually asks a question on something I already mentioned earlier in the class, posed, "Why do we have to watch it?"

"Maybe, it has something remotely to do with astronomy."