Summer 2006 has officially started! The weather still thinks it's Spring, but our days are mostly sunny.

DANCE at the Hole In The Wall: Theater X-Net

Starring: 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!
NEW! Spitfires of the Spaceways
Watch Dale Arden rescue Flash Gordon for a change!

Charity Alert: Keep that resolution this Summer! Click on The Hunger Site every day.

Sitemeter Sez: West Covina, California; (A Bindlestiff Fan!) United Arab Emirates; San Jose, California; Kalispell, Montana; (Looking for Bibler Gardens.) Brainerd, Minnesota; Odenton, Maryland; Kampong Bukit Hijau, Selangor, Malaysia

In The Community: We looked up and a small flock of giant Turkey Vultures circling us at the edge of Bibler Gardens as we videotaped FVCC's Current Events show up there yesterday. The Hockaday Museum of Art is still upgrading that database! John Rawings' multi-media CD is ready for next week's presentation at the Rotary Club. John played that SAME presentation in Cairo, Egypt a few weeks ago, and was rewarded with an invitation to build a ceramic installation in Egypt's Museum of Modern Art this December.

Media Watch: I had a lapse of taste and watched So You Think You Can Dance? -- they replayed that unfortunate lady throwing up AGAIN, but most of the show consisted of good dancers. GAWD! They're dragging it out for nine more weeks at two shows a week though.
Christopher Hitchens was on NPR yesterday morning -- I turned him off rather than ruin my day. It turned out he's adding public drunkeness to his current M.O. of spewing out weasely right-wing propaganda.
Frankie Thomas was the last interviewee in Earth vs. SF Filmmakers -- he played Tom Corbett, the original Space Cadet, during the early 50's. Here's a fairly good Tom Corbett Space Cadet Website.
I really don't recall seeing that show as a kid in Salt Lake City, but I remember their competition -- Space Patrol.


Here's one of those opportunistic male Pheasants eating out of our box feeder on the back deck Tuesday evening. Our cats don't mess with these big birds!

Rain at night -- alright! The weather on Sunday and Monday was excellent during the day. That rapror circling round Little Foy's Lake was big enough to be an Eagle, but I think it was a Red Tailed Hawk. There are at least three Canadian Goose families on Firehouse Pond.

Sax Legend Maceo Parker at: Theater X-Net

Starring: 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!
NEW! Spitfires of the Spaceways
Watch Dale Arden rescue Flash Gordon for a change!

Charity Alert: Keep that resolution as Summer approaches! Click on The Hunger Site every day.

Sitemeter Sez: San Angelo, Texas -- Out-clicked to my own site, http://theatre.net; Brooklyn, New York -- looking for the Spiegel Tent; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania -- looking fot the Bindlestiffs at Fleisher's. There are Bindlestiff fans out there!
(I wonder how Bonnarroo went for them?)

In The Community: The gang at the Hockaday Museum of Art is taking a deep breath before changing the lower gallery and doing Arts In The Park this upcoming month. We are also upgrading our database to include location numbers in our permanent collection -- tedious and boring, but necessary. John Rawings is repeating his Sacred Stones lecture at another community venue on June 29. (Now where'd that damn multi-media disk go?)

Media Watch: Reading again -- Earth vs the Sci-Fi Filmmakers: 20 Interviews (2005) by Tom Weaver. A pretty good Web Review HERE.
Here are some more books by this interviewer/author/fan extraordinaire:
Double Feature Creature Attack: A Monster Merger of Two More Volumes of Classic Interviews
Universal Horrors: The Studio's Classic Films, 1931-1946
John Carradine: The Films
Interviews with B Science Fiction and Horror Movie Makers: Writers, Producers, Directors, Actors, Moguls, and Makeup
Poverty Row Horrors!: Monogram, PRC and Republic Horror Films of the Forties
Science Fiction Confidential: Interviews with 23 Monster Stars and Filmmakers
Science Fiction and Fantasy Film Flashbacks: Conversations with 24 Actors, Writers, Producers and Directors from the Golden Age
I Was a Monster Movie Maker: Conversations with 22 SF and Horror Filmmakers
As George Clinton might say: Dawg-assed shows are some of man's best friends!

A-list New York model Yvette Vickers became a B-movie villainess in Los Angeles with low-budget Amerian International Pictures like Attack of the 50 Foot Woman.

This digitized image is from a color cheesecake photo, shot around the time she was Playboy's Miss July of 1959.

It was raining most of Friday, and started to clear up on Saturday. Glacier National Park has had flooding on the trail to Avalanche Lake because of the combination of precipitation and runoff. Since they send EVERYBODY to that same damn place, it creates a problem when things like this happen. They need more destination trails up there. (All they gotta do is find the money, and make sure it's alright with the bears.)

Sax Legend Maceo Parker at: Theater X-Net

Starring: 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!
NEW! Spitfires of the Spaceways
Watch Dale Arden rescue Flash Gordon for a change!

Charity Alert: Keep that resolution as Summer approaches! Click on The Hunger Site every day.

Sitemeter Sez: Two more visitors from abroad -- Buenos Aires, Argentina and Lisbon, Portugal. It's Sunday, which means Tanya Memme's fan club will be searching the Net again after Sell This House starts.

In The Community: Hockaday Museum of Art this afternoon! Our first two visitors are from New Jersey.

Media Watch: George Clinton and Walter Cronkite's team-rap Dope Dawg Decades has exceeded 200 viewers mid-month at the Huffington Post. It's no big thing, but Jim Soular's sensitive poetry barely passed that number each time.
The publicity campaign for Superman Returns continues! Speaking of Comic Book movies -- X-Men III did alright. It's holding on while other "blockbusters" are fading away. There's a media-heavy site at X-MEN III. The English actors are very good in this series, and I like Famke Janssen as Jean Grey -- Hooray for models! Academy Award winners Halle Berry and Anna Paquin seem to be gladly slumming in the Comic Book neighborhood too -- work is work.

Famke (Beumer) Janssen, doing her former job -- born in The Netherlands, she is one of the relativly few fashion models who have successfully switched over to movie careers. She plays Jean Grey AKA "Phoenix" in the X-Men movie series.

Physical prescence is a definite requirement for Superhero(ine) casting. Even Shakespearean actors Patrick (Dr. X) Stewart and Ian (Magneto) McClellan have it. When I was a teenager reading the original X-Men, poor Jean Grey had almost no character to speak of, no sex appeal, and she was hardly super-powered at all as the ironically-named "Marvel Girl." Writer Chris Claremont changed all that a decade later, and I'm glad. This is a franchise that could entertain the world for a long time, if treated with good humor and respect.