Wildlife: I wish the Whitetail Deer ate thistles -- those damn weeds make nasty, thorny thickets that screw up everybody's habitat.
(See picture at left, when it gets there -- Photo-blogger doesn't seem to be working right now. NOTE: Picture in place 7/7/05)

Visit: A Tale of Two Movies

Weather: Sunny days on July 4th, with high cumulus clouds -- perfect summer weather. The whole valley shimmered under a double layer of lights last night -- normal electric ones, and crazy flares of black powder, in multitudes of colors, shapes, and patterns.

Charity Alert: The Animal Rescue Site Click on this, and the other five donation tabs.

Media Watch: MTV VULGARITY ALERT! (If you don't want to read about stupid, low-rent, adolescent humor, skip the last part of this post.)





I saw Eminem's new video, An Ass Like That, at the end of an MTV special purportedly about producing it. The whole thing was an outrageous comedy sketch, with puppets portraying various real people, and some goofy cameos by the selfsame real folks, called Making the Ass. Besides Eminem (M&M, AKA Martin Mathers), it starred Triumph, the Insult Dog.
"A white rapper? Now you can disgrace TWO races at once!"
Triumph is a sock puppet, voiced by a man named Robert Smigel: 'Triumph' webpage from Maverick Times I could say that the humor rarely rose above the poop-on-the-sidewalk level, but that wouldn't include the times in fell into the toilet, or was outright offensive.
I'll give Making credit for vitality and unabashed stupidity. The actual video was a letdown, except for the P-Funk t-shirts worn by some limo riders at the beginning. (Mathers IS a friend of George Clinton.)

Wildlife: A row of ducklings with their mama duck sat in a row on our log, with a few gaps -- they weren't really spaces, but turtles sunning themselves alongside their neighbors.



Visit: A Tale of Two Movies

Weather: No rain yesterday, but do late-nite fireworks count as weather?

Charity Alert: The Animal Rescue Site I'm not through with helping them, or the other five click-to-donate sites.

Media Watch: A film version of the Wizard of Oz from 1910, followed by the 1939 MGM classic on TCM.
The 1910 Wizard looked like it might have been a "highlight reel" from the VERY successful stage play which toured the world before and after WWI. Nine year old BeBee Daniels played Dorothy Gale. (She played Dorothy Brock in 42nd Street, twenty two years later.) The Tin Woodman and the Scarecrow looked a lot like the characters in the preceding book, and later MGM musical. Toto, Cowardly Lion, and a number of unnamed farm creatures were played by people in full-body masks and costumes, crawling around on their hands and knees. The magic was made by trap doors, smoke bombs, and lifting wires -- common theatrical effects at the time, although there were a few film dissolves. The film had more than a few moments of inept, crowded blocking, and most scenes ended with some silly dance steps from the characters. There were chorus-girl guards turning a few kicks -- wearing black-leg, white-leg tights for some unusually visual photo-play for those days.
It is my understanding that many early films were made and distributed as "highlights" of famous theatrical productions -- if this is one of them, then its possible that some of the original cast were captured on film. My previous reading tells me the stage actors who played Tin Woodman and Scarecrow did so for twenty years or so, and created the template that Ray Bolger and Jack Hayley followed in the Technicolor version. (Bert Lahr had already created his own character, on the hardscrabble stages of Vaudeville, and I'm glad he was encouraged to clown away with it.)

Wildlife: Whitetail Deer cavorting around Big Foy's Lake and Middle Foy's Lake -- even with spotted fawns.



Visit: A Tale of Two Movies

Weather: High white clouds rolling through deep blue skies -- no rain today.

Charity Alert: The Animal Rescue Site Keep helping them -- let's feed some critters with your clicks.

In The Community: First Friday means the Hockaday Museum and some other downtown Kalispell art galleries are open in the evening. (I'm writing this at the desk.) Hockaday Museum of Art
We featured the U.S. Forest Service's video The Greatest Good, and had a reasonably full house!

Garage Sale Booty: Good Night, Sweet Prince -- A biography of early 20th Century actor John Barrymore (1881-1941) -- who was as much a character in real life as any dramatic character he played onstage. This looks like a wartime edition from about 1944. His films from the sound era are marred by the effects of alcoholism, but some of his fire still shows through in Grand Hotel, and in some episodes of the Bulldog Drummond series. His silent performances are living demonstrations of the term "histrionics."

Media Watch: Speaking of the Barrymore family -- Lionel Barrymore was over the top in The Mysterious Island from 1929. It was 25% talkie and 75% silent, with about 10% plot and charactarization subdued under 90% goofy special effects and laughable pseudo-science-fictional adventure. (Sounds like it could be made today, huh?) Jules Verne's Captain Nemo was named Prince Dakkar, but there WAS a submarine too.
The Ghost of Slumber Mountain -- A very early dinosaur movie by Willis (King Kong) O'Brien from 1917. It had NOTHING to do with ghosts at all, but that's how they sold it -- the stop-animation Allosaurus, Stegosaurus, Brontosaurus et al, were still fun to watch.


Winold Reiss, Artist of the Great Northern
Hockaday Museum of Art