Fairly steady snow -- it only builds up an inch or two at a time. The soft temperatures cause midday melts. Raccoon tracks came from across the street to the North -- Little Foy's Lake. Our two resident Eagles seem to be hunting together, and there's a little family group of Whitetail Deer poking under logs trying to get at the Pheasants' Sunflower seeds.

Footbarn's Celebration of Theatre: Theater X-Net

Starring: Ida Rubinstein Belle Epoch Russian/Parisian beauty.
Ida's Places in Paris -- from my first jet-lagged day by the Seine.
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: Make a resolution as the days get longer to click on The Hunger Site every day.

In The Community: Native American art and artifacts from the Northern Plains, and Blackfeet artists take center stage at the Hockaday Museum of Art this Friday.

Media Watch: NFL Football -- today's winners go to the Superbowl. These conference championships are often better than the supposedly "big game."
Some oddly interesting stuff on TCM's usually-drab Cartoon Alley -- Daffy Duck as a WWII commando fighting Nazi vultures -- with a rotoscoped Adolf Hitler; Bugs Bunny "missing his turn at Albuquerque" and being chased through the Black Forest by Marshall Goering. Bugs rides the same horse dressed as the same Valkyrie he played a decade later in What's Opera Doc?. He also meets Hitler, and scares both villains off by impersonating Joseph Stalin; In the early days of Television, before I was even in 5th grade, cartoons like these were included in the indifferent rotation given to children's programming. For artistic, commercial, political, and social reasons, many WWII cartoons, and others, were later weeded out of garden-variety TV. (My friends Bob and Parley Holman were particularly fond of these time-specific media indulgences.) One cartoon I can't remember seeing as a kid was originally titled Gremlins From The Kremlin, which TCM played between Bugs and Daffy. Madcap director Bob Clampett cast Der Fuhrer himself piloting a bomber, solo, over the Soviet Union, which then falls apart in the skies, due to innumerable tiny Russian-stereotyped Gremlins sabotaging his plane to the tune of Volga Boatman. I'm sure the Cold War was a factor -- a mask of Stalin causes 'Adolf' to freak right out at the end.
Book TV tweaked my imagination with Jeff Sypeck speaking about his book Becoming Charlemange, and made my stomach hurt with Politically Incorrect Shakespeare -- the latter being re-fried, decades-old, right-wing propaganda, meaning lies, about Demonic University Professors supposedly stifling our cultural heritage. ('Nuff Said!) The former was about grim mideavel warlord Karl Der Gross (LOVE that name) becoming a major fountainhead of Christian Legend as my ancestors slowly acquired Civilization. In reality, Emperor Karl played an important part in prompting Europe to climb out of it's Dark Ages pigstye, and legends of his reign inspired many people over the following centuries.
Real Books -- I'm reading The Shakespeare Wars by Ron Rosenbaum. I am NOT a scholar, but the expansive vocabulary of words and phrases in Shakespeare's plays and sonnets always led me to suspect many hands in their creation. I doubt that he was a sovereign playwright in the mode of Moliere, Shaw, or O'Neill, but there is NO EVIDENCE for any of my suppositions. From what I am reading, there seems to be scant evidence for ANYONE'S suppositions about the authorship of Shakespeare's major works. Enjoy good live performances, or read the plays and poems -- you can't lose.

This ain't Shakespeare!

It's Chapiteau Bleu at Footsbarn Theatre's 35th Anniversary Celebration! Father Seamus (Shame-us) and his Sinful Sisters have dismounted from James' Velocycle, and are taking up a collection for booze. The Sisters string up their knickers in the cafe/bar for their street-theater entreaties. (L to R) Sister Christina, Sister Faustina, Sister Rachelle, and Sister - nah - Father Seamus under a veil, hustling another Euro or two.