Wildlife: A huge Rough Legged Hawk was precariously perched on the top if a skinny spruce tree on Lakeshore Drive yesterday.

NEW Web Site: Theater X-Net

Featuring: Ida Rubinstein Belle Epoch Russian/Parisian beauty.

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

Weather: Arctic blast -- it is 1 degree (F) right now, but the sky is steel gray. I wonder if it will snow? (Update: 11:30 AM -- it's snowing.)

Charity Alert: Outside it's FREEZING, inside you can click on: The Hunger Site.

Media Watch: It's December 7th today. There are articles throughout the Media about the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor and it's aftermath. Tora, Tora, Tora was on TCM the other night -- it isn't the greatest movie ever made, but it's good -- especially for a war film, in that it's mostly about people who are part of extraordinary events as actors and reactors.
I was born eight years afterward, and grew up with WWII defining my times for good and bad -- it was the nuclear trigger for the "Baby Boom" for one thing. (I think my parents likely would have met anyway, since they both lived in Salt Lake City.)
That damn war was probably inevitable, given the circumstances after WWI, but I think that a worldwide determination NOT to succumb to "The Inevitable" gained some strength and power after 1945, despite some serious setbacks. We may yet see our way through these terribly irrational times of today without "The Worst" happening to us all.


About 25 years ago I saw an art show by a woman whose family was driven from their home on the West Coast and imprisoned in a Utah concentration camp during WWII because they were of Japanese descent. I don't remember her name, but one of her images quoted an Utamaro print with the All-American silhoutte of Superman perceptible through the canvas of a wall tent -- as a prison guard rather than a protector. The camps were mostly populated by women, children, and the elderly, because Japanese-American men of draftable age were sent off to fight the Nazis in Europe.
This unknown Utamaro (above) with Siegal & Shuster's Superman defacing the corner cartouche envokes her memory.