Raining like it's Springtime -- GOOD! They're getting snow on the Great Plains to the east of us. The Deer are grazing in small family groups again -- that's supposed to mean they're finding enough food. I hate to mention it, but I'm going to have to call the County -- there's a Deer carcass floating in 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 Post-Equinox resolution to click on The Hunger Site every day.

In The Community: Still sick, but a new design for the Hockaday Museum of Art's Website is under way. I have Honors Symposium at the Red Lion Hotel tonight -- Vitamin C, Espresso, Tylenol, and now Cortizone inhalers are my friends and allies!

Media Watch: Nobody likes dawg-assed horror movies more than I, but some misbegotten 50's films were too bad to even rank as dawg-assed. Beast With A Million Eyes was tacked onto a short series of "cult" movies on TCM -- Roger Corman's mildly-interesting A Bucket of Blood and deadly-dull The Terror (despite Boris Karloff and Jack Nicholson bouncing off their castle walls without a decent script). Beast was an unrelated ultra-cheapie, shot in a bizzare isolated palm grove, somewhere in the deserts of postwar California. The acting, writing, direction, effects etc. were too morbid and unpleasant to even be ineptly funny. I fast-forwarded right to the "climax," where the vampire-bat doll and superimposed zooming eye were peeking out of the top of the garbage-can spaceship. I'm guessing Beast was sold as an imitation of William Cameron Menzies' Invaders from Mars. The only thing at all interesting in that gawdawful flick was a huge 1948 "woodie" style ranch wagon.
The contemporary English invasion movie Devil Girl from Mars is often slagged for lacking in humor, but it was a Marx Brothers classic compared to Beast With A Million Eyes. The much-maligned Ed Wood had wit and ingenuity many cuts above his fellow low-rent filmmakers -- crapola like Beast demonstrates that Wood was very far from being the "Worst Director of All Time."
Greatest Dancers on BET was a lot more fun -- here's a sample of their results (with my humble opinions):
1) James Brown (Deservedly so -- RIP); 2) Michael Jackson (Top Ten for sure); 3) Nicholas Brothers (DEFINITLY Top Five); 7) MC Hammer (Raised the bar in Hip-Hop); 8) Savion Glover (Should be higher); 9) Beyonce (She's just about the most popular young diva in the world, and she dances well, but ...); 10) The Temptations (OK, they deserve some credit -- at least as good examples.) 12) Alvin Ailey (Boo-YEAH!); 16) Shakira (She's good and popular and belongs on a current list like this.) 17) Cab Calloway (He was FUNKY before they called it that.) 19) Tina Turner (Since I saw her in person, I can testify that she was a DAMN good dancer!); 21) Gregory Hines (Higher folks, this guy was extraordinarily good!); 22) Rosie Perez (Nice lady -- glad she's being honored.)



Maila Syrjäniemi Nurmi was a model for artistic greats Alberto Vargas and Man Ray before hosting horror movies on late-night TV in Los Angeles during the 50's as Vampira. This is a fanciful lobby card for Ed Wood's Plan 9 From Outer Space, in which she appeared with wrestler Tor Swedish Angel Johnson. I guess we could dub her the Finnish Succubus, since she was born in Scandanavia too. Read about her career in the Wikipedia.