Weather: Most of the week was clear and hot (for here). Today rain sweeps the valley from south to north from waves of turbulent black clouds. Our view of Glacier National Park is lost in a deep-gray haze, but I won't be surprised if there is white on the peaks tomorrow.



Visit: A Tale of Two Movies

Wildlife: Maybe it's so dark the deer think its evening. I saw one grazing by the road about one o'clock in the afternoon.

Charity Alert: The Animal Rescue Site Simply click to donate on this, and five other donation pages.

In The Community: Earlier this week, I shot some video for Flathead Valley Community College's regular cable infomercial up a nearby hill, on the grounds of Bibler Gardens. The flowerbeds and views of the valley are fantastic, plus there are many unusual birds and animals living there. This next Current Events segment will be special because I've recruited Marca Vogle, our Recruiting Officer to share the front of the camera with Tara Burkhalter, our Information Officer. We are getting conversations instead of press releases, and I'm happy about that. We are shooting at the school again on Thursday, so Bibler Gardens was kind of an on-the-job-training session for Marca.

Media Watch: Dancing With The Stars finished up with Kelly and Eric winning out over John and Charlotte. The latter couple was VERY consistent, as they had been throughout the series. Their two dances on the last night both scored three 9s from the judges. Kelly, the Soap Opera Lady wore the same costume that had almost fallen off two weeks before, but it was re-designed with extra straps. The trouble was, her first dance only got a score of 25 from the panel. (That damn costume's just plain jinxed!) Alec, her partner, really stepped out in the athletic dance which followed -- Kelly performed all sorts of carries, drops, and spins. It looked like there were some minor flubs because of timing and recovery, but they received three 10s in a row anyway. Along with votes from phone calls and the Internet, Soap Opera Lady beat Sitcom Actor at the end. The pollsters estimated that 16 million people watched this show. Well, we did too, and had a very good time.
I am less than overwhelmed by the new season of Queer Eye For The Straight Guy. The ending of a show of any kind is so important, but they complained about the client's girlfriend in the final segment again, verbally ganging up on her. It wasn't funny the first time, wasn't funny the second time, and left a bad feeling for me, the viewer.
I watched the first part of AFI's tribute to George Lucas last night. Boot-licking is not entertainment in my opinion, so I was ready to switch the channel -- but William Shatner started the show (WHAT?!?) as a comedian. He acted as if he was at a Star Trek convention at first, then did one of his excruciatingly bad talk-songs (Paul Anka's My Way) with a chorus of Imperial Storm Troopers -- "Regrets, I've had a few, ANYBODY SEE HOWARD THE DUCK?" -- Funny! Funny! Once the tongues started wagging I went away.
My own appreciation: Lucas has done more to advance the technology of moviemaking than anyone else in the last two generations, so he surely deserves his share of praise. My favorite Lucas film is American Graffiti, although I like some segments of Star Wars too. He has weaknesses, like everybody -- remember what Jedi Master Yoda says: George Lucas writing dialogue so terrible at is.

Garage Sale Booty: I found some real highs and lows among the used books this weekend: Lows FIRST -- The Elvis Sightings inutterable nonsense by Peter Eicher; The Tarot Murders -- A Novel of Suspense by Mignon Warner; TV 80 (actually published in 1979) superficial rubbish about then-current television stars by Lisa Freeman; Higher than low -- Movie Comedy Teams (1974) by Leonard Matlin; Saturday Night Live (1977) scripts and photos from their best period, edited by Annie Beatts & John Head;
Recent Anthologies -- Kate Chopin: The Awakening and Selected Stories; Contemporary Fiction: 50 Short Stories Since 1970; Older Anthologies -- Cathedral (1984) by Raymond Carver; Great Tales of Fantasy and Imagination (Pocket Books 1954, 1st PB Edition); The Writer's Chapbook (1989 1st Edition) Interviews with famous writers from the Paris Review by the late George Plympton; Other Hardbound First Editions: Interface: The Painter and the Mask by Francoise Gilot, a fine artist, best known for her long-time liaison with Pablo Picasso; Bluebeard by Kurt Vonnegut; The Generous Years: Remembrances of a Frontier Boyhood by Montana's own Chet Huntley; (I bought it for about 80 cents. People ususlly want a fortune for this minor autobiography around here.) Paperback Poetry -- Leonard Cohen: Selected Poems 1956-1968 (11th printing 1977); The Energy of Slaves: Poems by Leonard Cohen (1973, First PB Edition). Reprinted Paperback Classics -- How to Read a Book: The Art of Getting a Liberal Education (1940) by Mortimer Adler; The Dwarf (1945) by Nobel laureate Par Lagerkvist. (Author of Barabbas and The Sybil, two books about people who encounter Divinity, and suffer as a result.) The Pure and the Impure (1932 & 1941) by French literary master (or is it misteress?) Colette; Dusk of Dawn (1940) by W. E. B. Du Bois, including Honoring Dr. Du Bois (1968) by Martin Luther King, the latter's last major speech before his assassination.
Dr. Du Bois has left us but he has not died. The spirit of freedom is not buried in the grave of the valiant... Rev. Martin Luther King Feb. 23, 1968

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.)