Merry Christmas! A wildlife sing-along -- 12 Mourning Doves, 11 red Finches, 10 swirling Starlings ... 5 gorgeous Pheasants, 4 hungry Magpies, 3 Hairy Woodpeckers, 2 California Blue Jays, and a Bald Eagle on Middle Foy's Lake!

Updates are coming: Theater X-Net

Featuring: Ida Rubinstein Belle Epoch Russian/Parisian beauty.
Read more about Ida in Sisters of Salome by Toni Bentley

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

Weather: Low 30's (F) and gray skies, but I had my sunglasses around my neck just in case.

Charity Alert: Give by simply clicking on The Hunger Site.

Out and About: I walked into Pier One Imports with my latte in hand, and the manager asked where hers was. After she helped me find what I wanted to buy, I went to the nearby Seattle's Best Coffee shop and came back with lattes for the three hard-working staffers at Pier One. Their Christmas Eve was a 10 hour workday.
I was standing in line at a "Dollar Store," waiting to buy some cool gift bags, but it didn't seem to be moving. My biggest fear was that I'd hear "PRICE CHECK" from the register at the front of the line. ("Hmm -- I wonder how much THIS costs?")

Media Watch: I saw about 20 total minutes of NFL Football today -- Kansas City skunked San Diego, Washington did the same to the NY Giants, and Indianapolis was resting their starters in Seattle. (Good idea -- the playoffs are much more important now.) MAD-TV's Frank had Christmas carolers singing the comedy, and Jillian wore a lightweight, almost summery, dress -- her loosely-hanging skirt was cut to drop slightly below the knees at the back while rising slightly above her knees in front. She's wearing that style often lately.
While wrapping presents I had the first Flash Gordon serial running on DVD. Another invitation to: Michael's Montana Web Archive
My future Spitfires of the Spaceways webpage looks like it will need a few more episodes featuring Princess Aura, as played by Priscilla Lawson, than I originally thought. Dale Arden and Wilma Deering each have their all-too-rare moments of decisive action, but Lawson's character had much more fun and excitement before twenty years of censorship in Hollywood supressed not only sensuality, but self-reliance and initiative in women's roles. Early Flash Gordon is just ONE example -- in a silly context, perhaps -- but an example nevertheless.


Priscilla Lawson from the 1930's:
As spitfire Princess Aura (Left) -- saving Flash's life;
A publicity shot (Right) about the time she signed to MGM.

Updates are coming: Theater X-Net

Featuring: Ida Rubinstein Belle Epoch Russian/Parisian beauty.
Read more about Ida in Sisters of Salome by Toni Bentley

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

Wildlife and Weather: The Bald Eagle perched by the aereation pond at first light this morning. The widespread meltwaters might have made it difficult to spot. The temperature was nearly 40 degrees (F), and everything was slushy. The roads were driveable, at least, but there were big puddles of runoff at every intersection. Big banks of clouds shrouded the mountains, and I hope it was snowing up there!

Charity Alert: Soak up some good karma with a contributing click on The Hunger Site.

In The Community: The Hockaday Museum of Art and Flathead Valley Community College are both CLOSED for the rest of the year 2005. I'm going to get another nighttime photo of the Hockaday before we take the lights down, though.

Media Watch: I was busy today, and didn't sit in one place very long. Last night I saw a program on the History Channel about the origins of the Christmas story -- there were many of the same faces I saw on 48 Hours earlier in the week talking about the same subject, only THIS time they included the contradictions with history resident in those miraculous gospels and traditional tales.
While I was getting ready to go out this morning, I flipped through Fox's morning show from Los Angeles and there was Jillian Barbarie doing "The Weather!" Why is that expression in quotes? Her maps and forecasts were showing on the screen, but she wasn't saying anything -- she danced around gleefully while a visiting choir sang an acapella Christmas song. I figure that dance she was doing was called "The Weather." It was actually heartfelt and cute -- she's best when she's spontaneous. There will be NFL football on TV for the next three days, but who knows if I'll have time to catch her act later?
There were some beautiful selections of classical and pre-classical music playing on Montana Public Radio as I drove around.

Out and About: Christmas shopping means crowded stores and dangerous parking lots, but it also means chance meetings with friends and moments of delight when you find what you're looking for. I read the local paper during lunch and the editorial page was full of letters from incensed dupes going on about their putative war on Christmas which rages in their OWN minds and sours their OWN bowels.
I'll take visions of sugarplums for myself -- Merry Christmas!

Wildlife: Two small family groups of deer were grazing around the neighborhood as I drove home last night.

New Website: Theater X-Net

Featuring: Ida Rubinstein Belle Epoch Russian/Parisian beauty.
Read more about Ida in Sisters of Salome by Toni Bentley

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

Weather and Charity Alert: Freezing rain over already-icy roads. I couldn't leave for work until after sunrise, and even then I slid in a few places. No tire ever invented can grip these surfaces. Click on The Hunger Site rather than drive your car AT ALL today.

In The Community: Flathead Valley Community College is open because we have one more day of finals. How do you reschedule THEM?
I'm off the hook for painting at the Hockaday today because of the weather, plus we lost a staff member yesterday to a full-time job elsewhere -- the first week of January is gonna be busy! (I have this premonition of the director calling me on Dec. 28th asking if I feel like painting...) Hockaday Museum of Art

Media Watch: I'm reading a collection of essays by Ray Bradbury -- Bradbury Speaks : Too Soon from the Cave, Too Far from the Stars (William Morrow 2005) His colorful poetic words are always a joy for me to read -- these short pieces are very personal and conversational, but I continue to learn and be inspired by this enthusiastic, eloquent man.
Excerpt of an excerpt -- all rights reserved by HarperCollins Publishers:
About Writing -- My Demon, Not Afraid of Happiness (undated)
I have a strange and incredible muse that, unseen, has engulfed me during my lifetime. I have renamed my muse. In a Frederick Seidel poem, I found a perfect replacement, where he tells of "A Demon not afraid of happiness."
This perfectly describes the Demon that sits now on one shoulder, now on the other, and whispers things that no one else hears.
My Demon warned me one night years ago when I saw some glum theater at UCLA. Later I said to the director, "You want me to stick my wet finger in a wall socket for electrocution. Instead I will screw a brighter bulb in the same socket and light the room."
So my Demon warned me off such encounters and provided invisible material for my future life.
Dandelion Wine, for example, began as an essay in Gourmet magazine in 1953, and over the years my Demon tripped me, sprawling, into a novel to be read in American schools.
On my twenty-fourth birthday, I discovered Winesburg, Ohio, which is indeed not a novel but a short-story collection by Sherwood Anderson. How fine, I thought, if someday I could birth similar grotesques to inhabit Mars.
My Demon, provoked, secretly made travel plans to landfall Mars, live there, and arrive at an unplanned novel, The Martian Chronicles...
A short tale, "The Black Ferris,"melded itself into a screenplay for Gene Kelly, and when Kelly couldn't find the money for the film, I spent three years turning the screenplay into the novel Something Wicked This Way Comes.
Then at last there is my late-on offspring From the Dust Returned, commenced when I drew skeletons, age six, to scare my cousins, continued in secret when I helped redecorate my grandparents' house with Halloween broomsticks, and ended with a gothic story, "Homecoming," rejected by Weird Tales as needful of Marley's ghost and lacking Poe. I sold the story to Mademoiselle, and over the years it grew in rain and mist and arrived in fogs as a novel just last year.
What we have here, then, is a very unusual approach to writing and discovering, not knowing the outcome. To move ahead on a blind journey, running fast, putting down thoughts as they occur.
And along the way my inner voice advised:
If you must write of assassinations, rapes, and Ophelia suicides, speak the speech, I pray thee, poetry in your breath, metaphors on your tongue. Remember how glad Iago was to think on Othello's fall. How, with smiles, Hamlet prepared his uncle's death.
Shakespeare and my Demon schooled me so: Be not afraid of happiness. It is often the soul of murder.
"Speak your love!" he advised an audience on Book TV earlier this year, and told the story of how a blown-down roller coaster at Santa Monica Pier turned into The Foghorn, which led to John Huston taking him to Ireland to write the movie version of Moby Dick, further leading to worldwide recognition of his vast talent.
He tells the tale in Too Soon from the Cave, Too Far from the Stars about how post-WWII public school students educated their teachers about him and other "Science Fiction" authors by taking these books to school and convincing their instructors to read them. A simple and true story -- I was one of those myriad students, and I was exceedingly proud to see Dandelion Wine and Fahrenheit 451 as part of our curriculum by the time I got to high school.


J. Allen St. John succeeded Frank Schoonover
as illustrator of Edgar Rice Burroughs' fanastic novels. Warlord of Mars is mentioned by Bradbury in Too Soon from the Cave, and this is probably the cover he saw as a youngster.

Charity Alert: Click on The Hunger Site rather than drive your car needlessly today.

New Website: Theater X-Net

Featuring: Ida Rubinstein Belle Epoch Russian/Parisian beauty.
Read more about Ida in Sisters of Salome by Toni Bentley

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

Wildlife and Weather: 33 degrees (F), freezing rain, and crazy drivers who pick THESE kinda days to play Mad Max on the highways. There was a thirty foot swath of blood spread out at the bottom of Buckboard Lane, with a deer's body crumpled at the trailing end. It takes a long time to stop in this weather.

In The Community: The Hockaday Museum will be closed for the Holidays -- all HAIL will break loose after New Year's Day -- three galleries to strip down and fill back up in a week. Hockaday Museum of Art

Media Watch: 48 Hours did a show comparing the biblical accounts of the Christmas story with our many traditional retellings. It also tried to present the pathetically few facts backing up any of these largely supernatural tales, while downplaying the serious errors of history committed by their long-dead authors. The broadcast was full of faces I normally only see on the History Channel. Christmas is a lot like it's symbolic tree -- many things can be hung from it's branches, but it's main intent is CELEBRATION!


(L) Coca Cola's version of Santa Claus, painted over two generations
by Chicago's Haddon Sundblom (1899-1974)
(R) Part of Sundblom's cover for Playboy,
another long-time Chicago institution, from 1972
A History of St. Nicholas/Santa Claus

Wildlife and Weather: One Bald Eagle stuck around by the aereation pond until it was almost too dark to see him/her fly away, like about 5 PM. The days are so short that the temperature doesn't have time to change -- it was 10 degrees (F) at 6 PM and 10 degrees (F) at 7 AM.

New Website: Theater X-Net

Featuring: Ida Rubinstein Belle Epoch Russian/Parisian beauty.
Read more about Ida in Sisters of Salome by Toni Bentley

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

Charity Alert: Click on The Hunger Site for an easy way to lift somebody's spirits.

In The Community: Somebody's collection of works by a Blackfeet artist was just donated to the Hockaday -- no wonder the director wants those shelves ready before Christmas! We'll announce it to the media soon. Hockaday Museum of Art

Media Watch: Ted Allen of the Fab Five was on NPR today, talking about Christmas dinners. I wasn't really fond of Queer Eye's wedding show the other day -- too extravagent, with less-than-insightful decisions all the way around, but I'll always listen to Ted when he talks about cooking -- he can be a confidence-builder. The Food You Want to Eat, Allen's current cookbook on NPR
Monday Night Football had one of the sorriest games I've ever looked at. The Ravens won 48-3 over the Green Bay Packers in Baltimore, but I'd already seen enough by the end of the first quarter. Interested in the playoffs?
Associated Press report 12/19/05 The two-time defending Super Bowl champion New England Patriots clinched the AFC East this weekend, then the Cincinnati Bengals took the AFC North. The Denver Broncos also assured themselves a spot in the playoffs.
After New England blanked Tampa Bay 28-0 on Saturday, improving to 9-5, it eliminated Miami from taking the division crown. The Dolphins fell out of the playoff chase despite a 24-20 win over the New York Jets on Sunday. Denver also won Saturday, beating Buffalo 28-17. That was enough to guarantee the Broncos (11-3) at least an AFC wild-card berth. They lead the West by two games over San Diego, and will clinch the division with one more win or a Chargers loss. Cincinnati's 41-17 rout of Detroit moved the Bengals into the postseason for the first time in 15 years.
Indianapolis and Seattle already were in. The Colts (13-1) have home-field advantage in the AFC, even though their perfect season ended with a 26-17 loss to San Diego. The Seahawks (12-2) took their 10th straight victory, 28-24 at Tennessee, earning them a first-round bye. They own the NFC West title.
I turned the TV over to CSPAN -- Vint Cerf, Google's Chief Internet Evangelist, chatting about the importance of open networks and widespread universal access to the Internet. He's one of the true founders of the Information Superhighway, who led ARAPNET off of Defense Dept. computers to become the hubless public network we know today, with the World Wide Web being just one branch of it.
I saw a King Kong ad just before I changed the channel -- big deal, except it wasn't for the movie. The product was an interactive game where the user could roam Kong Island playing one of the white guys in the flick, or even being Kong himself. I notice that the movie is doing alright, but with it's $200 Million budget it will need darn near everybody in the world to see it twice before it makes a profit.


Faye Wray (1907–2004), the great Hollywood personality best known for one single movie, although she starred in others.
On the viewing deck of the Empire State Building in 2004 (Left)
Notice that same "look" in the publicity still from 1932 (Right)

Wildlife and Weather: Two Coyotes were strolling across our lake in the long gray morning before the sun rose above the mist. It was minus 9 degrees (F). I'm sorry to see them or hear them -- very opportunistic predators. We are keeping the cats inside until midday for awhile. (Not that they want to stay outside in this brutal cold.)

New Website: Theater X-Net

Featuring: Ida Rubinstein Belle Epoch Russian/Parisian beauty.
Read more about Ida in Sisters of Salome by Toni Bentley

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

Charity Alert: Cold schmold -- click on The Hunger Site. We went to Costco and bought a load of dog and cat food for the local animal shelter today. I was in a very good mood, unlike last week, but the press of people in the stores still creates situations where someone is always seems to be in someone else's way. Saying Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays are great ways of lifting everybody's spirits.

In The Community: FINALS WEEK at the college -- all slackers emerge from the woodwork and get it over please! Besides that, there's two video students who are finishing their projects tommorrow, and Current Events is behind schedule, so it will be simpler than planned. I have to finish making that shelving in the Hockaday Museum's vaults, and still find time for holiday preparations.

Media Watch: While Christmas shopping, I saw an anthology called The American Pinup from Taschen, a publisher of popular art books. The cover was from a calendar circa 1940. I see these kitchy artifacts from many generations all over the antique stores.
One of many Websites devoted to Pinup Images
Book TV showed a panel discussion from November 15, with Nadine Strossen, Ariel Levy, Kay Hymowitz, Nelson George and moderator Catherine Orenstein at the Center for Communications New School University which was remarkable in the fact that all half-dozen or so participants actually spoke in turn, and listened to one another. The subject was the nature of sexual content in the mass media -- music videos, advertising, and so forth. The featured panelist was a lady named Pamela Paul who authored a book called Pornified; How the Culture of Pornography is Transforming Our Lives, Our Relationships and Our Families, which is starting to make a buzz. She was personable and polite too. Ms. Paul's Website
Everyone generally agreed that sexual imagery had definite effects on society, but they were complex, and censorship often made bad effects worse. MTV Networks also ran a show about sexual harrassment and music videos.
Hmmm -- was something going on today, or am I just looking for these kinds of discussions?
NFL Football -- Pregame Madness was cut short by shopping. Penn & Teller did a bit with MAD-TV's Frank which wasn't particularly funny, considering all that talent on camera. (I should mention that Penn & Teller's series Bullshit on Showtime is mostly that very thing -- don't waste your time.)
I missed Jillian Barbarie's segment. Is that why I sought solace in cheesecake pictures published when my late father was only a young lad?


Classic Pinups by (L to R):
Zoë Mozert, Earl Moran, Alberto Vargas, and George Petty

San Diego handed Indianapolis it's first defeat of the season -- the Colts are going to be sorry if they continue to allow Peyton Manning to take lickings like he did this week and last week. Washington surprised Dallas at every turn, and I mostly did chores in the afternoon rather than watch such a lopsided drubbing. I tuned in to the Chicago game in the evening while also doing other things -- it was near 0 degrees (F) and the Atlanta team was out of it's element. If you like defense, Chicago's your team. They don't have much at the quarterback position, but it's rare when they do. That town just abuses anyone who ever gets the job, and regional rivals like Green Bay, Minneapolis, Indianapolis, St. Louis, and Detroit hate them --- and well, they can't seem to win, even if they win games -- ask Jim McMahon.