Anyone who saw the lunar eclipse yesterday (the first during the winter solstice in about 500 years) may have noticed that as the Moon disappeared it seemed to take on a reddish hue. So why did this happen? For the same reason that the sky is blue during the day and red during sunset/sunrise: Rayleigh Scattering. Please refer to my handy diagram.

Handy Diagram

Ignoring the terrible proportions, due to the position of the Sun the man in the top hat is experiencing day and the couple on the "top" of the Earth are watching the Sun set or rise. The white light from the sun travels straight and contains all the colors (wavelengths) in the visible spectrum, but upon striking the particles in our atmosphere it scatters by a process called Rayleigh Scattering. As indicated, the shorter the wavelength of the light, the more it will scatter, and since blue has a shorter wavelength than other colors in the visible spectrum it will scatter the most, making the sky appear blue for our top-hatted gentleman. This also means that the unscattered light that passes straight to our couple will be weighted towards the orange/red end of the spectrum, producing a brilliantly colored sky. But what about the the eclipse? Examine now the dandy diagram.

Dandy Diagram

Although the diagram isn't exactly what one would call "to scale," it gets the job done. Arranging our celestial bodies for a lunar eclipse, we see that the light that does get to the Moon (before totality) has to pass barely around the Earth and hence through its atmosphere. This sunlight will have had much of its blue/green light scattered away, explaining the reddish appearance of the Moon during an eclipse.

My brother and I have been on a movie-watching rampage the last few days. We started with Steven Chow's hilarious and extreme Kung Fu Hustle, and continued our marathon with Home Alone 2 (featuring Donald Trump and Tim Curry, more on him later) and Miyazaki's Castle of Cagliostro (I'll do Lupin eventually, I swear!). Our most unique selection was surely the mystifyingly ponderous "Valhalla Rising". I am sad to report that the movie's title is, incredibly enough, less self-important than the film itself. The Scandinavian epic combines about 30 seconds of the most brutal violence you will ever see depicted, perhaps a dozen lines of dialogue, 45 minutes of men staring at clouds and 30 minutes of those very same men lost in clouds. Yet despite all this I can't bring myself to call the movie bad. It actually did manage to entertain and confuse me during its excruciating runtime.

Of course these all pale in comparison to the incomparable Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla, that my entire family watched the last night. If I had to pick just one part of the brilliance we just witnessed to share, it would have to be the King Caesar summoning song. Magical, truly magical.

I promised more about Tim Curry, and I shall deliver. Today's villain is Hexxus.

Super-polluting fiend of Fern Gully fame, Hexxus is a pretty unique villain in that he doesn't want to steal, conquer or benefit any nefarious scheme in any way. His only goal is destruction, and lots of it. Maybe this diabolical musical number will help clear up his motivations. Seriously though, this guy is nasty. He appears to be composed only of the most noxious smogs, gunkiest goos, and slimiest sludges, each infused with more evil than the last. Sadly after a horrifying transformation into a blazing obsidian skeleton cloaked in corrupting ooze, he is defeated by the movie's strongest (and the world's lamest) forces: flowers and love.