Wildlife: On Middle Foy's Lake as the migrations proceeded, we saw: A Crested Cormorant with a beautiful long white neck; A Hooded Merganser, slurping along the surface of the water; And a Bald Eagle fishing for unwary trout, or pearching in a tall pine tree.



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

Weather: It was cold all weekend. I stacked up a whole garbage can's worth of exhausted flowers from the annuals around the house and deck, but there's still more planters to empty. I mixed some hardy alyssiums in with my transplanted catnips, so they will look better.

Charity Alert: The Hunger Site Click -- just click, to trigger a contribution from a sponsor!

Media Watch: Jimmy Carter was on CSPAN, but his host Brian Williams was often recycling GOP talking points, and wasn't listening to the best ex-president we've ever had in our lifetime.
Gina Gershon sighting! She plays the director of FEMA in CBS's miniseries Category 7: End of the World, with Randy Quaid, Shannen Doherty, Tom Skerritt, James Brolin, and Swoosie Kurtz. I wanted to say she's been getting better roles than playing sexual deviants, thieves, and criminals, but is the Director of FEMA a "good" role in the wake of Hurricane Katrina? Some people's luck ...
NFL Football -- Donovan McNabb needs an operation. Philly isn't going to the Superbowl or the playoffs unless he's healthy. Terrill Owens was suspended from that team too, but that's a whole other matter.
Pre-Game Follies -- Frank from MAD-TV was extraordinarily funny on Fox's pre-game show -- he impersonated G.W. Bush trying to dodge questions at a press conference.
Jillian Barbarie's weather-girl segment co-starred Pamela Anderson, promoting her new sitcom unfortunately named "Stacked."
Jillian was trying to keep things light and funny, but Ms. Anderson was acting her too-familiar role of a ditzy blond, and the omnipresent bad taste of mostly-unspoken big-bust jokes put everything under a cloud.
Barbarie's humor relies on taking sexual stereotypes right up to the line of harassment, and then daring someone to cross it. The laughs come when she lets the tension go away with a throwaway line or dismissive gesture. When the four-man panel comes back on-camera, they are usually laughing about Jillian taking one or more of them down a peg.
Yesterday the panel had their heads down, and were uncharacteristically silent afterwards. It turned out to be one of those things that might have seemed to be funny before the show, but died onstage. Y'know what? Barbarie and Anderson both looked beautiful, and neither of them said anything unladylike. There was a "right way" of doing this idea -- too bad it didn't happen that way.

Now for something completely DIFFERENT:

Ride of the Valkyries
by Arthur Rachkam, from Ring of the Niblung 1910
Sing along with Elmer Fudd: "Ki-ill the Wabbit, ki-ill the Wabbit..."
otherwise you'll be thinking about Apocalype Now or (gasp!) even Richard Wagner.

Wildlife: While driving home last night, we saw these little points of light floating above the road ahead of us, so we knew to slow 'way down for the small herd of Whitetail Deer up the hill.



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

Weather: It has been colder this weekend. The thermometer outside says it is close to 50 F, but the wind makes a liar out of it. I'm doing a dozen chores outdoors to winterize the house -- BRRR!

Charity Alert: The Hunger Site Click to help!

Garage Sale Booty: A salt-and-pepper shaker in the shape of a telephone; Books -- The Ring of the Niblung, illustrated by Arthur Rackham. A copy once owned by a library, but otherwise complete and in full color; Sikh Festivals by Dr. Sukhbir Singh Kapoor, illustrated by color photos; The Photographic Illusion by Duane Michaels; Uncle Tungsten by Oliver Sacks; Two nonfiction books by Issac Asimov -- ...Guide to Halley's Comet, and The Beginning and the End, which starts with a little essay about the REAL soldier/writer Cyrano DeBergerac (1619-1655), who was famous in his time for writing the fantasy Voyage to the Moon;
and FINALLY, Cyrano's illegitimate step-child Flash Gordon and the Caverns of Mongo by Alex Raymond (NOT!) -- a ghost-written pulp novelization with endpapers and a frontispiece by Robb Beebee. He may share his surname with lead-handed film director Ford Beebee, who oversaw the Flash Gordon chapter-serials, but I doubt there's a connection -- who knows?

Robb Beebee's Flash Gordon and the Caverns of Mongo from 1936
The dust jacket illustration and plot summary are included here:
Holloway's Flash Gordon Essay
Classic Comics stalwart Arthur Lortie researched connections between Robb and Ford Beebee
Ford was a descendant of the 49ers, and a lifelong Californian.
Robb lived in New York and was more often associated with religious publications.

Wildlife: Whitetail Deer are all over the neighborhood. I think that buck that ran in front of me the other night was killed a few nights later by traffic -- there's a big body laying on the side of the road in about the same spot where I had to hit my brakes.



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

Weather: It's reasonably dry here today, but those clouds are threatening, and it's snowing on the border in Eureka, Montana.

Charity Alert: The Hunger Site Click to help a half-dozen charities.

Media Watch: NPR tries to give us a window on the world, but it's rarely pretty -- Cruel shortages of doctors in Africa; Unconscionable neglect of the earthquake victims in Kashmir; Abyssmal depopulation and corruption in New Orleans; A Radio Tour of Krishna's city Vrindavan in India;
Well, THAT was nice -- warts and all -- but it had very little to do with the purported subject of belief in the the afterlife. Most religions, including the Hundustani veneration of Krishna, are much more about how we LIVE than they are about mystical cosmologies. National Public Radio
Speaking of India -- We saw the late Ismail Merchant and James Ivory's The Guru from 1969, starring Michael York and Rita Tushingham. The movie's depiction of York as a Rock Star is pretty weak, but that's probably the writer's fault -- when he and Tushingham act as normal English people they are very convincing. Overall, it's a fairly good, though very slight, film.
Here's what James Ivory says about it:
The Guru seems now to be a brightly colored fairy tale, a kind of 1960s fable, in which a muddled young urchin prince is deposited, via Air India's flying carpet, in a land of broad rivers, oriental domes, and harems full of plotting ladies. In this ever-so-puzzling kingdom, ruled over by an insecure despot who can thunder one moment and summon up divine music the next, our urchin prince has many strange adventures. There are witches who cast evil spells, magic amulets, a courtesan who is strangled by her own strings of pearls, cups containing mind-altering brews, and ancient seers who deal out both encouragement and fierce rebuke.
At the end of all his trials, the young prince, now enlightened, boards his magic carpet to return to his own far off land. He is sheltering his treasure in his arms - the simple, good-hearted maiden he has set free from her imprisoning dreams, and who loves him. The Guru, the most unseen and mysterious of our movies, was Merchant Ivory's version of a sixties trip. To me anyway, it holds up as well - though some might say no better than - any of the others of the genre that have survived. -J.I.


Classic Sri Krishna
Krishna on Wikipedia

Wildlife: I seem to be out and about with the Whitetail Deer in the mornings lately.



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

Weather: Rain, with snow above 5000 feet. The sun came out briefly about noon.

Charity Alert: The Hunger Site Click to help people, forests and animals.

Media Watch: Thanks to a tip on DailyKos.com, I saw Joe Wilson on CSPAN last night while dishing out Halloween treats.
I wish I could stay as focused and rational while fighting the unprincipled thieves and liars who are his enemies.
From the senators who make false claims about his reports, to the journalists who repeat known lies to his face, just so that they'll be heard one more time, the scale of the machinery of retribution is massive, and it is awe-inspiring to see someone standing up to all that abuse.
His greatest point remains partially obscured by the drama of his plight -- the people who manipulated false intelligence to preconcieved ends, and cavalierly exposed top-secret information for political payback struck a literal blow on the safety of everyone in our country. It shouldn't be a partisan issue -- boundaries and laws have been violated by those responsible for maintaining them.

One Halloween film I WISH was on TV last night:

Patricia Laffan as the Devil Girl From Mars
with her walking refrigerator -- uh, robot guardian