Education and Entertainment

Looks like I may be teaching Planetary Science in the Winter quarter here. That'll be good experience for me. The trick is to remember that this is an upper-division class and NOT intro astronomy. In some ways that will be easier. I spent most of Friday updating my CV, arranging for letters of recommendation, preparing a letter of application and going over my teaching portfolio. I'm sure I wasted most of that time. I've been led to understand that I essentially have the job and that the application is more a bureaucratic formality. There are very few others here qualified to teach this class and they won't want to. My only real concern now is with office hours. My office is essentially a broom closet with a window.

We finally got 'round to seeing Stardust today. It's a contender for "The Greatest Movie Nobody Saw." The Watsonville theater isn't showing it. We had to go to Gilroy, and it's only on the smallest screen at one theater there. A small theater in Santa Cruz is also showing it, but that's it around here. It just opened a week ago, right? Why is it so hard to find? It's like Serenity. It may be great and it may even sell out, but it won't make any money if nobody shows it. Bought the book afterwards. I'll read that when I finish Potter. I'm about mid-way through "Half-Blood Prince". Anyways, we quite enjoyed Stardust the movie. Not DeNiro's typical character. Oh, and I finally saw the trailer for the Dark is Rising. Like many of you, I was unimpressed. If you didn't know there was a book that it was failing to be a movie of, it might actually be decent. I'll probably end up seeing it anyway. Knowing the Star Wars eps 1-3 were blowful ahead of time didn't stop me from seeing them.