Quantum Leap

ON AND OFF THE AIR:* "Trek" alert! While you won't notice it immediately because the series is in repeats, WBFF-Channel 45 tonight makes ,,TC mid-course correction in the scheduling of "Star Trek: The Next Generation," which adds yet one more viewing to the weekly schedule.Now, new episodes of the syndicated series will premiere each week on Wednesday at 9 p.m., with that episode repeating at 6 p.m. Sunday. Previously, Sunday at 6 was the first-run premiere time on Channel 45, with a Saturday at 6 p.m. repeat.

SARASOTA, Fla. -- Forget he's Ben McDonald, former No. 1 pick of the draft, the highest-rated pitching prospect of all time. Think of him as Ben McDonald, a pitcher whose ability can never match his publicity, a young man learning his craft.In that context, McDonald put together a breakthrough season in 1992, not that anyone gives him credit for it. He continues to be judged unfairly, against expectations he did not create and cannot possibly meet.What did McDonald accomplish last season?

AVALON," BARRY Levinson's valentine to Baltimore families and tradition, opened over the weekend, and Baltimore responded with sellout crowds at the Senator Theatre.More than 6,500 tickets were sold over the weekend at the 50-year-old theater on York Road, where the film had a benefit showing a week ago.Tom Kiefaber, owner of the Senator, said "Avalon" opened "on the level of an 'Indiana Jones' or a 'Hunt for Red October.' We have been very busy." "Avalon" chronicles the experiences of an immigrant family, the Krichinskys, in Baltimore.

IT WAS A FEW MINUTES BEFORE air time and the talk show host was about to begin his daily radio program. He poured himself a cup of coffee and then, turning to me, said something surprising:"You know, this job never gets any easier," confessed this erudite man who for years has presided over an extremely popular call-in show. "Every time I go on the air, I have to overcome a fear that I'll fail; that the show won't be any good."He paused. "But I've found out something interesting about failing.

In a random moment that a physicist might appreciate, a Russian Ph.D. named Katya Denisova suddenly found herself revealing the secrets of the universe to students at a troubled Baltimore high school. She offers energetic proof of the power of teaching Ninety minutes can be a long time to sit in physics class, but Katya Denisova's students don't stay in their seats for long. They walk clockwise around the room, stopping at different stations to see what everyone else wrote about why humans can only see one side of the moon.

Movies have been based on books and comic strips and real life and even magazine articles, but "Bodies, Rest & Motion" may Movies have been based on books and comic strips and real life and even magazine articles, but "Bodies, Rest & Motion" may be the first to be derived from one of Newton's Laws of Motion. That law -- the Big No. 1 maintaining that a body at rest tends to remain at rest and a body in motion remains in motion -- describes the fates of a set of Generation X layabouts, mall rats, underemployed connoisseurs of boredom in a mythical Sun Belt city.

The ties between Maryland and Notre Dame in men's lacrosse already run deep. Both Dick and George Corrigan, uncles of Fighting Irish coach Kevin Corrigan, were All-American attackmen for the Terps . On the flip side, Maryland coach John Tillman once interviewed for a job at South Bend. The word Wednesday that Notre Dame will join the Atlantic Coast Conference, in all sports but football and ice hockey, takes things even further. Five times, the schools have met in lacrosse.

HOW MANY universities show more interest in their nationally rated chess club than the football team? That's the way it is these days at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, an institution that turned 30 this week, but which already has big ambitions for the next three decades.It didn't start that way. UMBC came into being through a political power play by Baltimore County's lone state senator in those days, James A. Pine, who needed to fortify his support in the west-end. Thus, a campus of the University of Maryland was planted in Catonsville.

Toward the end of "Little Buddha," I began to expect an offscreen voice that would stop the movie cold by proclaiming, ++ "No, I said a Bud Lite!"Alas, what Bernardo Bertolucci has uncorked is a strange brew that might be called Buddhism Lite.This peculiar film is more than one beer short of a six-pack. It's part massive folly, part screwball tract and part steel nerve, even a little heroic.Give Bertolucci credit, he's not frightened of being laughed at. "Little Buddha" is essentially a $35 million Sunday school film, meant to introduce the young-at-heart to the tenets of the faith.

When the doors of Enoch Pratt Free Library opened yesterday, the public saw the results of what Pratt Director Carla D. Hayden described as "a quantum leap into the 21st century."The Pratt unveiled a computer system that allows library patrons all over the city to reach the World Wide Web, search the library's collection of 2.1 million books and other resources, and find information from colleges, universities and 3,000 community information providers.Early reviews were positive."I like the new system," said Miguel Diggs, 18, of Rosedale.