Featuring: The illustrated story of Ida Rubinstein
Russian/Judaic Princess of Belle Epoch Parisian Theatre.
Wildlife: A full-rack Whitetail buck was chasing a doe across Buckboard Lane this morning. How appropriate -- of course there's a REAL buckboard (horse-drawn wagon) parked by the edge of the aforementioned road. As a matter of fact, it is parked in the same yard from which the two deer emerged this AM.
Visit: Michael's Montana Web Archive
Theater, Art, Flash Gordon, Funky Music and MORE!
Weather: Still stuck inside of that damn fogbank -- a little snow falls occasionally. The cats pester me to let them out at 7:30 AM, but the low clouds make it too dark, despite DST ending last month. Dare I ask the weather to "lighten up" a little?
Charity Alert: The Hunger Site -- Click to help make the Holidays special indeed.
Media Watch: A small book by Issac Asimov about Halley's Comet, written in anticipation of it's return. This famous celestial visitor was a major spectacle in 1910, but was almost unseen in the Northern lattitudes during 1986.
I'll always remember my parents packing our car full of kids to see Comet Mrkos in 1957. It was twilight, and a fairly new moon was up in the Western sky. Comet Mrkos was below and right of the moon, just above the horizon. It really looked like a sparkler in the sky, about the width of my second-grader's fist. The shaggy-looking comet was easier to see when clouds covered the moon, but it got brighter as nightfall approached. (See picture below.)
One of the most lasting impressions of that little jaunt was how rural the banks of the Jordan River used to be in Salt Lake Valley, even though it was only about two miles or so from my house in the post-war suburb of Rose Park. We saw the comet at the junction of Redwood Road (17th West) and 10th North. There was a trapezoidal iron-lattice bridge across the Jordan there, and an identical structure to the south at 4th North. I still dream of them both, and the willows and wildlands which surrounded them.
For the first ten years of my life, this Northwestern area was given over to drainage canals and marshlands all the way to the Great Salt Lake. I hate to describe how overbuilt it is now, but the homeowners there can tell you how the water table rises up into their basements, and the Salt Lake International Airport authorities can tell you how their runways sink or rise with yearly rainfall, or lack thereof.
over an online painting (artist unknown) -- reproducing
my view of the same comet in the Autumn of 1957.
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