Wildlife: The various blackbirds, finches, and cowbirds -- babies and adults -- were sure active when the hailstorm was over yesterday! (see below) They besieged the feeders by the dozens as the sun came out for a minute, and kept eating during the long rainstorm which followed.



Visit: A Tale of Two Movies

Weather: About 5 PM yesterday, it started raining, then HAILING -- stones the size of marbles -- luckily they were soft rather than hard, otherwise the car parked outside of the garage might have been damaged.

Charity Alert: Animal Rescue Site -- click on the other five too.

In The Community: German-American artist Winold Reiss is the focus of what may be the most important exhibit the Hockaday Museum of Art has presented since Call of the Mountains -- The Artists of Glacier National Park in 2002.
Read a little about Winold Reiss HERE
I'm off to help hang the show after my work is over here. I'll be driving down to Jackson Hole, Wyoming to pick up some additional paintings soon -- FREE VACATION!

Media Watch: It was a fairly important weekend in political history. The grim theatrical battle over judicial filibusters was forced into a guarded truce when seven senators from each party (total: fourteen) forged a "compromise" of a sort, rather than watch their power drain away in the aftermath of a forced rules change.
For good or bad, this story dominated the news: Here is one reasonably good place to read about the "nuclear option" power grab. (Daily Kos)
CSPAN was right where the action was -- good for them. They also ran the weekly National Press Club speech, featuring PBS' beleaguered CEO Pat Mitchell, once the Senate's ugly drama was done.
"We are going to be criticized from the left for being too right, from the right for being too left," Mitchell said in her speech, "and that probably means we're getting it mostly right,
Let me say this: PBS will BECOME history, rather than report on it, unless they fight back against the would-be censors foistered on them by right-wing extremists. Ms. Mitchell was correct in declaring that this non-commercial educational network has no substitutes among any of the 500+ satellite/cable stations. (...or any combination either, says I.)
Reading again -- I finished Jimi Hendrix : The Man, the Magic, the Truth by Sharon Lawrence. It is an interesting read -- she was a friend of Hendrix, with her own point of view about what happened, plus she has the tapes, notes, and transcripts to back up whatever she says.
She didn't have a positive relationship with Buddy Miles, saying very little good about him, but she seems to like Billy Cox, and Mitch Mitchell. Noel Redding is remembered well, as is Chas Chandler.
(Chandler helped Jimi when Hendrix really needed it, but he also started something bigger than he could handle. She acknowledges his later success with Slade, last of the Liverpudlian 'supergroups,' who were an important bridge between 'Glam' and 'Punk.')
I wasn't happy to read yet another version of Hendrix's death -- asserting probable suicide, rather than dumb carelessness with pills -- but she was THERE, in London, at the exact time it happened, and I wasn't. One thing we agree on though, is that members, or a single member, of his entourage could have given him a chance to live if they'd called for medical help immediately.
Lawrence paints a scary portrait of how he had NO control of anything in his life during his final months, and how his sleazy manager was running up a huge mortgage on Hendrix's future. (He later died in a plane crash around '73.)
She spends the last third of her book detailing the fortunes the vultures have made picking the bones of his legacy. His father, his half-sister, Paul Allen, and other lawyers and litigators look pretty bad under the light of her gaze.