Charity Alert: Click on The Hunger Site rather than drive your car needlessly today.

New Website: Theater X-Net

Featuring: Ida Rubinstein Belle Epoch Russian/Parisian beauty.
Read more about Ida in Sisters of Salome by Toni Bentley

Visit: Michael's Montana Web Archive
Theater, Art, Flash Gordon, Funky Music and MORE!

Wildlife and Weather: 33 degrees (F), freezing rain, and crazy drivers who pick THESE kinda days to play Mad Max on the highways. There was a thirty foot swath of blood spread out at the bottom of Buckboard Lane, with a deer's body crumpled at the trailing end. It takes a long time to stop in this weather.

In The Community: The Hockaday Museum will be closed for the Holidays -- all HAIL will break loose after New Year's Day -- three galleries to strip down and fill back up in a week. Hockaday Museum of Art

Media Watch: 48 Hours did a show comparing the biblical accounts of the Christmas story with our many traditional retellings. It also tried to present the pathetically few facts backing up any of these largely supernatural tales, while downplaying the serious errors of history committed by their long-dead authors. The broadcast was full of faces I normally only see on the History Channel. Christmas is a lot like it's symbolic tree -- many things can be hung from it's branches, but it's main intent is CELEBRATION!


(L) Coca Cola's version of Santa Claus, painted over two generations
by Chicago's Haddon Sundblom (1899-1974)
(R) Part of Sundblom's cover for Playboy,
another long-time Chicago institution, from 1972
A History of St. Nicholas/Santa Claus