More of these Autumn mornings please! The Slough had dozens of Ducks feeding on their migration. There was a big Red Tailed Hawk hunting in the fields along the Stllwater River as well.

Sitemeter Sez: Visitors from around Montana, the USA, and Madrid, Spain.

Remembering my friend George-O at: 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!
Spitfires of the Spaceways
Wilma Deering & Dale Arden to the rescue; Bodacious Princess Aura I; Hapless Aura II; The fiery Emperor Ming; The Orson Welles Rumor Debunked; and BOTH incarnations of Jean Rogers!





Thanks to Jim Keefe (Visit his Website) -- the LAST Flash Gordon illustrator of the 20th Century, and Flash's first illustrator of the 21st, for his recommendations -- HERE!

Charity Alert: Keep that Resolution to click on The Hunger Site every day. Also check into Terra Sigilata blog -- donate $$$ to cancer patients just by clicking onto the site.

In The Community: Catch the last few days of Inuit -- A History Told In Art at the Hockaday Museum of Art. I'm doing some work at the College today, and blogging on the run between times.

Media Watch: I've been reading about sleep and dreams in a REAL book by Christopher Evans. Some scary, cruel research has shown that lack of sleep causes death, and lack of dreams causes madness. We KNOW that we need to refresh our bodies and minds, but exactly WHY? still seems to be a mystery.


Gustave Dore's engraving about the dream of Jacob (Israel) at Bethel. He also wrestled with an angel, and did pretty well until the cheatin' bastard made him go lame by magic. Goes to show that wrestling was fixed in ancient times too! Thanks to the website which hosted Dore's biblical illustrations, which have been in the public domain for generations -- my fair use of one of them does not constitute any recommendation of the host site's content.

Another beautiful Autumn morning on a traditional Columbus Day. Once this quasi-holiday was a jingoistic brag-fest, now it's becoming an occasion to reflect on 500+ years of Imperialism and it's consequences. Christopher Columbus sold his voyage as a route to the Indies -- he was SO WRONG, but then nobody in Europe or Asia really knew about North & South America. The "Small Earth" theory was a delusion, but Columbus still borrowed the rap to jive potential backers. There is some minor evidence that literate mariners knew about landfalls west of the old Greenland colonies in the 15th Century, but not near enough to be conclusive. Somehow Columbus was confident that he would find land at the longitudes he actually found it, which counts a little bit. Whatever knowledge originated with the Vikings was lost or scrambled, but there WAS shipping recorded out of Iceland in the early Renaissance, and who knows where all those sailors journeyed? I'm certain some of them visited Greenland, and it's not really far to the Canadian Arctic from there.

Sitemeter Sez: Visitors from Los Angeles, California; Saint George, Utah; San Antonio, Texas; Elliston, Montana; and Chicago, Illinois.

Remembering my friend George-O at: 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!
Spitfires of the Spaceways
Wilma Deering & Dale Arden to the rescue; Bodacious Princess Aura I; Hapless Aura II; The fiery Emperor Ming; The Orson Welles Rumor Debunked; and BOTH incarnations of Jean Rogers!





Thanks to Jim Keefe (Visit his Website) -- the LAST Flash Gordon illustrator of the 20th Century, and Flash's first illustrator of the 21st, for his recommendations -- HERE!

Charity Alert: Keep that Resolution to click on The Hunger Site every day. Also check into Terra Sigilata blog -- donate $$$ to cancer patients just by clicking onto the site.

In The Community: "Orphan Art" Auction at the Marshall Noice Gallery on Main Street for the Hockaday Museum of Art last night. I wasn't working though, and even spent a little money.

Theatre/Theater: Somebody's working over the Holidays! Katie Duck – Improvisation for dancers and musicians
December 28-31 / 13:00-17:00 / studio 7 - eerste nasaustraat 7 / 120 euros / for more information go to: www.katieduck.com


Here's one detail from my entry to the Hockaday Museum's 2007 Salon -- A Century of Changing ... and More of the Same. I've melded and colorized images from two centuries and two continents into one space, and relied heavily on a book called The Natural History of the Chorus Girl © 1975 by Derek Parker and Julia Parker, instead of drawing or shooting the pictures myself like I did last year. However my assemblage constitutes a whole new work of art, and is protected by the Fair Use principle of International Law, in that it is a personal exercise with no commercial purpose whatsoever.
(BTW -- I heartily recommend the Parkers' book!)

The clouds blew away for about 36 hours -- cold mornings without them, but the beautifully mild Autumn weather continued.

Sitemeter Sez: Visitors from Newark, New Jersey; Athens, Georgia; Emeryville, California; Unspecified, France (looking at Topor and Panique); Cardiff, Wales; New Orleans, Louisiana; Casper, Wyoming; Raleigh, North Carolina; Basel and Vaud, Switzerland; Berlin, Germany.

Remembering my friend George-O at: 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!
Spitfires of the Spaceways
Wilma Deering & Dale Arden to the rescue; Bodacious Princess Aura I; Hapless Aura II; The fiery Emperor Ming; The Orson Welles Rumor Debunked; and BOTH incarnations of Jean Rogers!





Thanks to Jim Keefe (Visit his Website) -- the LAST Flash Gordon illustrator of the 20th Century, and Flash's first illustrator of the 21st, for his recommendations -- HERE!

Charity Alert: Keep that Resolution to click on The Hunger Site every day. Also check into Terra Sigilata blog -- donate $$$ to cancer patients just by clicking onto the site.

In The Community: The 2007 Members Only Salon at the Hockaday Museum of Art goes up on Tuesday! We had BOTH Montana senators at FVCC on the day before yesterday-- living in a low-population state means things like this can happen.

Media Watch: Dancing With The Stars AKA Trash A Go Go is on TV again! Two-time champion Cheryl Burke drew a real schlub for a partner this time -- lounge lizard Wayne Newton. They were gone after the second show. There are a couple of front-runners, but a lotta dreck needs to be eliminated before any real contest develops.
NPR ran some alarmist propaganda about DRUG DEALERS in MIAMI trading in MEDICAL EQUIPMENT this morning. Horrors -- brown-skinned people with wheelchairs and walkers!
The hideously stupid perversion of what once was our health care system makes criminal exploitation inevitable -- the heartless protection from the law which the HMOs and other slimers enjoy has been co-opted by OTHER professional thugs.
Whatever the real truth is, I'm certain this story was planted as part of a Right Wing campaign against the SCHIP renewal specifically, and medical reform in general. Will Blackwater be patrolling our Emergency Wards?
(Take a breath....)

Doris Lessing won her well-deserved Nobel Prize for Literature. If you can stomach emotional roller-coasters, I recommend The Golden Notebook and her Martha Quest series Children of Violence. Some of her African tales are excellent too! I was worried that her Sci-Fi novels of the 80's might have put off the Nobel Committee -- they weren't her very best work, or the best S-F of the era, but there were brilliant passages in them.

Like A Version -- Dubbed for the Very First Time!


Detroit's Madonna Louise Cicconi (Now Mrs. Guy Ritchie of London) is reportedly signing some big new contract with the company that is touring the Rolling Stones. This is a redigitization of a scene in her book Sex from the early 90's. (Guess what it's about?) It was on the shelf at the Spokane Public Library, but was wirebound, so it fell apart FAST! She also put out a movie called In Bed With Madonna (Called Truth or Dare in America) about her Blonde Ambition Tour. "Do you think I'm overexposed?" she asked in the adverts.

Saturday's wedding was alright -- Autumn has gone into a time-warp where the days are cloudy, but not too cold, and the leaves are turning slowly. Big migrating Canadian Geese and small black-headed Ducks at the Slough.

Sitemeter Sez: Visitors from Eschborn, Germany; Ile-de-France, Paris, France; Southampton, New York; Ogden, Utah (Hey Sis!); and Sacramento, California.

Remembering my friend George-O at: 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!
Spitfires of the Spaceways
Wilma Deering & Dale Arden to the rescue; Bodacious Princess Aura I; Hapless Aura II; The fiery Emperor Ming; The Orson Welles Rumor Debunked; and BOTH incarnations of Jean Rogers!





Thanks to Jim Keefe (Visit his Website) -- the LAST Flash Gordon illustrator of the 20th Century, and Flash's first illustrator of the 21st, for his recommendations -- HERE!

Charity Alert: Keep that Resolution to click on The Hunger Site every day. Also check into Terra Sigilata blog -- donate $$$ to cancer patients just by clicking onto the site.

In The Community: The 2007 Members Only Salon at the Hockaday Museum of Art will open soon. We had a BIG response to John Houston's appearences last week -- lots of better-informed visitors taking in the Inuit Art. Senator Max Baccus will be around the FVCC campus today. He's scheduled to do a ribbon-cutting ceremony at the new Arts & Technology Building tomorrow too.

You only have a week to see this stuff in person!


Nesting Goose -- Serpentine Inuit carving circa 1960

Media Watch: NFL Football -- New England won without much effort -- they want to go to the Superbowl again. Poor Denver faced their mighty divisional rival San Diego with most of their own offensive team injured and out. The Chargers ate the Broncos lunch for them 41 to 3.
Forty years ago tomorrow, Ernesto "Che" Guevara de la Serna (June 14, 1928 – October 9, 1967) was executed by agents of the USA and Bolivian governments in La Higuera, Bolivia. There has been a bit of to-do about him in the media lately. I will always remember the hundreds of prisoners shot down by firing squads on Prime Time TV, and the laughing, cigar-chomping Che Guevara continuing to send more to their deaths -- many for the crime of just having a job in Batista's Cuba, which required bribes and/or patronage. Many REAL criminals got away with their fortunes, while poor laborers and pencil-pushers faced the firing lines.
His picture often represents resistance to my own country's stupid imperialism now, which is cruelly ironic -- his narcissisic bloodthirstiness and stupid, bludgeoning ideology were too similar to the damn Right Wing stooges who run our government now or the Taliban or Al Quaida. I am personally disturbed that anyone takes him seriously -- at least anyone who thinks and feels. Guevara's handsome picture masks a poisonous myth. He was a Communist, and didn't believe in Hell -- I don't believe in Hell either, but I daresay Guevara would belong there for his violence against the working people of the World.


Sonofabitch won't even rest in peace -- the face of Duplicity and Death from Korda's all-too-familiar photo.