It's been foggy for at least 24 hours here at the college -- I'll blame the Stillwater River for some of it. I'd be happier if I saw those Eagles eating more often by the aereation pond at Middle Foy's Lake.

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 brighter to click on The Hunger Site every day.

In The Community: We are testing security hangers at the Hockaday Museum -- spring clips are too big, so I'm going to try short lengths of chain in the design. Things like these help keep folks honest. Hockaday Museum of Art

Media Watch: Young Roald Amundsen was impressed by the story of Sir John Franklin's fatal attempt to sail through the Northwest Passage in HMS Erebus and Terror with over a hundred doomed crewmen -- so impressed that he completed Franklin's quest at the start of the 20th Century. PBS' Nova showed a couple of films which trace the efforts of Franklin, the investigators who followed his trail of death, and Amundsen's voyage through the Northwest Passage in his small ship Gjoa, following coastal charts created by the aforementioned English investigators. The bleached and scattered bones of the men who died in Franklin's disaster still litter the beaches of King William Island and the adjoining mainland. Crewmen buried along the way were disinterred and investigated over the years.
Nova's Arctic Passage Films. It's worth noting that the Gjoa Expedition also mapped the Magnetic North Pole, and Amundsen counselled against using the Northwest Passage for subsequent navigation because of it's extreme difficulty and danger. PBS' film doesn't mention the times when Gjoa had to be manually dragged through cold shallow water in the Simpson Strait.
Amundsen was also the leader of the first expedition to reach the South Pole in 1911. He was under weigh for a run to the NORTH Pole, when Peary's claim of success caused him to change his mind and sail to the Bay of Whales in Antarctica. Many Britishers still harbor resentment over Amundsen's decision to "compete" with Robert Falcon Scott -- another doomed English explorer.
It later turned out that Amundsen's flight over the North Pole via dirigible in the mid-20's was the first verified visit there as well -- Cook, Peary, and Byrd all cheated in their logs.
After WWI Amundsen sailed his ship Maud across the nothern edge of Russia, and went broke trying to explore the Arctic Sea. He became an advocate of using aviation for polar exploration, based upon common sense and his own experiences in extreme climates, but ironically died as the result of a plane crash in the high Arctic.
I've read Amundsen's book about his North Pole dirigible flight of 1926. Here's a link to a Wikipedia article about that crazy event, from another point of view.
Amundsen might have been single-minded to a fault, but he was by far the most methodical and successful of all the great Polar explorers -- his scientific achievements weren't equalled until the multinational efforts of I.G.Y. in 1958.

Lighter-than-air-ships stimulated the public's imagination in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Baron Von Zeppelin made the very first powered manned flight in the early 1890's over Lake Constance in a motorized gasbag which made his name famous. Weather limited the usefulness of these big machines, though -- Amundsen's airship Norge crossed from Europe to Alaska alright, but couldn't return across the Arctic Ocean because of the winds.
To demonstrate the imaginative spell Zeppelin's invention cast at the time, Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote a book in the 1920's where Tarzan himself flies an airship into the Arctic to find adventure in a prehistorically-populated land inside of our own planet, accessible from the Polar regions. Burroughs not only got Tarzan at the Earth's Core (1928) out of the project, but Back to the Stone Age (1935) as well! Buster Crabbe's movie-serial version of Buck Rogers was a Zeppelin pilot too.


J. Allen St. John's wraparound cover for Tarzan at the Earth's Core, with a portion of Roy Krenkel & Frank Frazetta's cover for the sequel -- Back to the Stone Age (inset). Both books relied on the romance of giant airships. The hollow Earth idea continued to show up for many generations in Science-Fiction and Pseudo-Science too.