Wildlife: What was that sound on our deck? If it was a Raccoon, it was making the craziest noise I've ever heard -- kind of a fluttering, like a -- HOLY SOPWITH CAMEL, BATMAN -- that Dragonfly was over a half a foot wide!



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Weather: Smoke from several wildfires south of us is making the blue sky muddy.

Charity Alert: The Hunger Site Click and click some more.

In The Community: First Friday, a downtown gallery crawl this evening at the Hockaday Museum of Art. Our Hockaday Guild is also promoting a fund-raiser in Whitefish this weekend where an antique appraiser assesses people's old junk, uh treasures, Antiques Roadshow-style. I'll be shooting pictures there at the O'Shaunessey Center tomorrow.
Hockaday Museum's Website

Media Watch: In Search of Schrodinger's Cat by John Gribbin was welcome reading for getting my mind off the Hurricane Katrina disaster. Our government has allowed everything to get worse by lethal combinations of corruption, stupidity, and negligence. Those who have really been trying to help are taking the flack for putzing fat cats. (Yeah, those incompetents include George W. Bush.) Even the coddled newscasters are tired of gross deciet and inaction, and are starting to say the things they should always have been saying.
Michael Moore's Open Letter

Wildlife: A lousy Coyote started yipping and yelling about 10 PM last night. We haven't heard one of these guys for four years or so. I was hoping the neighborhood dogs were scaring them away, but ...



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Weather: A very pleasant early Autumn day.

Charity Alert: The Hunger Site Clicking is all you have to do to help SIX different charities.

Media Watch: We finally finished watching Ajay Devgan and Aishwarya Rai in the Bollywood movie Raincoat. It turned out to be a convoluted version of O. Henry's The Gift of the Magi. I've seen worse movies, but wouldn't recommend this to anyone either.
I'm reading In Search of Schrodinger's Cat by John Gribbin, about Quantum Mechanics, rather than Bertrand Russell's pre-WWI essays.
2005 marks the centennial of Albert Einstein's 'Miracle Year' -- 1905, the year that he published papers covering the topics of Brownian motion, the Photoelectric Effect, and Relativity -- setting down in print the famous equation E=MC(squared).

Wildlife: A big female deer ran past the rear deck at sunset last night. It's time to wrap the tree trunks with wire fencing. Damn creatures caused some damage last fall.



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Weather: Pleasant, but none of that predicted rain has fallen yet.

Charity Alert: The Hunger Site Click to help SIX different charities.

Media Watch: The devastation in New Orleans and on the Gulf Coast is terrifying. You have to see some of it, even if you don't want to, but you don't have to obsess about it either, or start shooting from the hip, assessing blame, either.
I finished the book about the Norse settlement at L'Anse aux Meadows in Northern Newfoundland by Dr. Helge Ingstad (neither an archeologist or geologist, but a fair writer and fund-raiser). His wife, Anne Stine Ingstad, did most of the work, but she did it well.
The dispute if the site is Leifur Eiriksson's house in Vinland continues perpetually, but L'Anse aux Meadows would have been easy for Greenland mariners to find. The sagas were correct in saying that Vikings landed in North America, even though they didn't suspect that it was the tip of a whole other continent stretching over half the globe, a hemisphere away.
The Norse didn't have maps, or a workable written language for another hundred years, so the Vinland Sagas weren't even contemporary with the real events, and were preserved as legends more than history.
Another thing the sagas indicate to me is the natives (Skraelings) were numerically stronger than the Viking colonists, which dampened the latter's desire to settle, or return very often for rather meager gains. Christianity was quickly spreading among the Northmen too, the age of widespread plunder had ended, and their kings were much more interested in consolidating their realms in Europe rather than expanding into distant, dangerous, disputed forest lands, so there would have been no backup forces to continue their invasions.
I started reading Bertrand Russell's Mysticism and Logic -- a group of essays written and presented before WWI. In one passage he describes the tension between inspiration and the hard slog of science necessary to prove an insight true. Einstein isn't mentioned, and I doubt that Russell had heard of him when he wrote these articles, but there are strong similarities to other writings by the great German physicist about related dilemmas when developing his new model of the Universe. I wonder if Einstein was reading the already-famous Russell in the years between Special Relativity and General Relativity?
Hey look at this! The cover is by Milt Glaser -- before Push Pin Studios.

Wildlife: The Raccoon was splashing around the reeds by the lake last night. There's a male pheasant who jumps onto the box feeder on the deck too, for the sunflower seeds.



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Weather: No rain yet, but there's low clouds sailing overhead, threatening moisture any minute. There's still lots of blue sky in between.

Charity Alert: The Hunger Site Click and click some more.

Media Watch: The original Topper, from 1937, starring Constance Bennett, Cary Grant, Roland Young as "Toppy," and BILLIE (Glenda, Good Witch of the North) BURKE as Mrs. Topper. It is an extremely well-timed comedy. Arthur (Dagwood) Lake was funny too.
TCM then played the sequel, Topper Takes A Trip, with the same cast, including Cary Grant in a flashback. Too bad it was a DAWG! (It even had a canine co-star.)
I didn't like Raincoat, a Bollywood movie with the beautiful Ashwari Rai and prolific Ajay Devgan. The writer/director/lyricist seemed too full of himself. His actors were absolutely first-rate, so when things were uninteresting or stupid, I knew who NOT to blame.

Wildlife: A big black Cormorant spead its wings right outside our kitchen window in the lake. They have to do this in order to dry them between dives.



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Weather: They are predicting rain, and I hope so, because we have a layer of forest fire smoke between us and the clouds. There is no blaze close to here, so I took a look at: Steamboat News. It looks like this smoke may be blowing in from the Bitterroot Mountains, between Missoula and the Idaho border, about 140 miles south of here.

Charity Alert: The Hunger Site Click away to help!

In The Community: Shooting good gallery pictures is hard work! I barely got 40% of the Winold Reiss exhibit shot yesterday afternoon. I'll need at least two more hours -- the pictures are all going back to their owners in about a month's time. The Hockaday Museum's Website
Day-um! I still have to shoot our street banners too! I want to do them in a new way, somehow. (Ladders? Cherry Pickers?)

Media Watch: I'm reading a book by Norwegian archeologist Helge Ingstad, from the late 1960's, about excavations in Labrador and Newfoundland for Viking settlements. The author was fooled by the now-discredited "Vinland Map," but he wasn't the only one. I didn't know that "Vinland" most likely meant "Grassland" in Old Norse either. Transcriptions from the sagas about Bjarni Herjólfsson, Leif Ericksen, and Thorfinn Karlsefni were delightful reading. The settlement Ingstad's wife, Anne Stine, excavated at L'Anse aux Meadows seems to have stood tests of authentication for the last 45 years.
So some of my Viking ancestors DID land in North America. They didn't stay long, or accomplish a lot, or even remember much of consequence -- they didn't know map-making, for instance, until many generations after Christianity was established.
Sanjay Doot and Salman Khan starred in a pretty dismal Bollywood comedy about two brothers wooing the same young woman. Salman's short, chunky car seemed to be able to zoom between India and Austria in 15 seconds though.

Wildlife: Three Ospreys were hunting over Middle Foy's Lake , plus the Bald Eagle showed up soon afterward.



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Weather: Cool nights, warm days, a welcome rainstorm a few days ago.

Charity Alert: The Hunger Site Just click to help.

Garage Sale Booty: A first-edition novel signed by -- (drum roll) Spiro T. Agnew! (drum sticks fall) What the funk !?! That lousy crook!?! Oh well, they can't all be signed by Lawrence Welk.

In The Community: I'm doing another Sunday afternoon shift at the Hockaday Museum of Art. We had a fabulous opening last Thursday for our new show The Horse In Flathead Valley Collections. One of the senior staff of my former employers Semitool Inc. showed up with his wife, who had a piece in the show. He was nearly struck speechless by the quality of our museum. "I've never been in here before!" He said again and again, "It's beautiful!"
The Hockaday Museum's Website -- Reminder: Winold Reiss, Artist of the Great Northern Railway will be gone in just about a month!
Ms. Kendall Wheeler and some other lucky inholders from Glacier National Park were on-hand too, so we got to talk some history as well. Lisa Schaus showed up, and some of our other long-time friends, but there were many new and welcome faces.

Media Watch: Indian movies from the friendly stores of Toronto and Halifax!
We saw a moustached Shah Rukh Khan on a big screen in Toronto in a costume drama set in some undefined ancient time -- we also saw many posters of Aamir Khan (no relation) dressed in a colonial British uniform, with another ugly moustache, wielding various 19th Century weapons, advertising a new blockbuster named Uprising, most likely about the Sepoy Mutiny in 1858.
Sanjay Doot has been one of my favorites lately -- he's very big for an Indian actor, and a little bit ugly, but he has incredible screen presence plus magnificent timing. He was the co-star of By Hook or Crook, otherwise known as One Plus One Equals Eleven. He does a lot of action movies and caper films like this.
Akshey Khanna and Suniel Shetti were very good in a Romeo/Juliet style farce with a happy ending. They had one early scene where the two duked it out to a draw. (They were both good guys.) Only a professional fighter is capable of trading blows with Suniel Shetti -- he's built like young Roberto Duran, and even looks like him. He's very well-trained and athletic, so another actor would have to be very careful in a stage fight with him. (The very physical Sanjay Doot and Suniel were also the stars of that fantasy flick I mentioned awhile ago, Rudrakesh.)
We saw the remarkable Shah Rukh Khan yet again in Swades last night, a sentimental, but somewhat realistic Bollywood flick set in today's India. Khan played a NASA engineer who travels to the state of Uttar Pradesh, and eventually tries to take on the social problems he encounters. The film acknowledges, and criticizes, both Tradition and Modernity. In fact, the writer's point of view is the best part of the whole thing.