Eagle Stories -- Over the weekend, one of the Bald Eagles flew up into a nearby tree -- one without leaves. I took a look through my spotting scope, and to my surprise, a Red Tailed Hawk was attacking the Bald eagle by repeatedly diving at it from above. The Eagle screamed and postured, but it couldn't defend itself where it was, so it retreated back onto the ice. We are pretty sure there is a Red Tailed Hawk nest in the evergreens across the lake now. Yesterday the big male Bald Eagle was chewing on a carcass near the rapidly-enlarging pool in the middle of our lake. This morning, the neighborhood dogs were scavenging what was left.

NEW -- Modern Dance at: 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: Keep that resolution thru the Equinox too! Click on The Hunger Site every day.

In The Community: We set up John Rawlings exhibit Sacred Stones; A Continuation at the Hockaday Museum of Art yesterday. Our director had a scary drive from the Charles Russell Auction in Great Falls -- about a foot of snow fell on the plains east of the mountains, and there were more accidents than she ever wanted to see happening before her eyes as she steered her way home. The Flathead Valley High Schools and Children's Art Shows are opening this Thursday -- I'll be tacking all that stuff on the walls for the rest of the week. Hockaday Museum's Web Site

JEFFERSON'S WALL: AMERICA'S DEBATE OVER CHURCH AND STATE; Lecture II-- Dr. Daniel Dreisbach from American University in Washington D.C. did NOT speak in depth about Thomas Jefferson -- in fact he tried to sell a particularly LAME thesis that the phrase "Wall of Separation" is systemetically used to suppress legitimate religious expression.
He relied on a half a dozen different rhetorical fallacies to make his arguement -- incomplete, cherry-picked quotations, ad homenum attacks, undocumented and actually false associations with known pariahs, like the Ku Klux Klan, plus partial, inconclusive "horror stories" of obvious injustices which were corrected long before they went to court.
After he finished his sales pitch, and spoke to the audience, it turned out he was a pretty nice guy who usually thought about what he had to say, and was fairly well-read -- all of which demonstrated that he KNEW his "Wall of Separation" harangue was an intellectual sham. Lawdy Lawd, I'm glad I didn't buy his book!
You may well ask: If he was so much in error, what are these errors, and why are they erroneous? If this series was a debate, there would have been someone on hand who was supposed to rebut his points, but it wasn't a debate, and my job was to be a technician, not an antagonist. My own suitability for debate of this kind is severely limited by my impatience toward right-wing pandering. I used to shovel pig manure as a Boy Scout for a local charity farm, and I'd feel as if I were doing the same thing if I had to even pretend I respected Driesbach's abuse of historical methodology.

Media Watch: I need to put up something aesthetic --


A digital drawing of current RDT dancers: (Top to Bottom) "Leaping" Lynne Listing from 1999; Chien-Ying Wang and Thayer Jonutz from 100 Years of Modern Dance; Angela Banchero-Kelleher from a 1998 brochure.