Martin Luther King's great I Have A Dream speech from 1963 was commemorated on C-Span, and shown as it appeared on NBC back then via videotape on Al Gore's Current TV.

Updates are under weigh: Theater X-Net

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

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Wildlife: Day-um! That was one BIG Bald Eagle on the lake today. Speaking of big, those male Pheasants feeding in the front must weigh close to 15 pounds.

Weather: A gray day, with a couple of very light snow flurries.

In The Community: The gift shop at the Hockaday Museum was selling things at a steady rate during Summer and Fall. It slowed down as Winter deepened, even with Christmas shoppers cruising through. Jewelry didn't move as well as it has done before. It would be nice to bring the numbers up before the tourist season starts again. See if there's anything you want to put in YOUR shopping cart -- Hockaday Museum of Art

Media Watch: Al Gore gave a great speech today, which was shown live on C-Span, and is being rebroadcast all over the media. So he sounded like a politician -- that's what he's been all his life. He told the truth, which is enough to make big waves in today's deception-swamped world.

Follow-Up: There were a couple of shows on satellite TV about Buffalo Bill Cody and Annie Oakley.
One was a slide show/lecture on C-Span about Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show and it's impact on the public's imagination. The effect was considerable -- people today know the name Buffalo Bill all over the world without knowing either the man or the legends about him.
The other was the 1935 Annie Oakley movie starring Barbara Stanwyck on TCM. Those fatuous legends I just mentioned were both laughed at in the movie, and used without shame. (Her husband did NOT damage his eyesight saving Sitting Bull from a drunken assassin.) Oakley had only passed away a decade before, and half of the movie-going public would have seen Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show a generation earlier.
I find it interesting that many dramatizations of Oakley's act in the movie were based on films of her actual performances. The costumes are exact copies, and Stanwyck duplicates Oakley's mannerisms to an amazing degree. There was something that struck my eye -- Annie Oakley was actually prettier than Barbara Stanwyck! Hollywood usually over-glamorizes their characters, but Oakley's prim good looks outshone the actresses who later portrayed her, or rather the tall tales associated with her name -- including Ethel Merman, Betty Hutton, and Gail Davis. The documentary films from the early 20th Century also prove she kept her wholesome beauty all her life. Larry McMurtry had a point about she and Cody being America's first superstars.


Annie Oakley circa 1910