An overnight snowstorm coated everything with white again, but it was above freezing all day.

Sitemeter Sez: South Boston, Virginia; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Buenos Aires, Argentina; Jersey City, New Jersey; Jefferson City, Missouri; Houston, Texas; Hingham, Massachusetts and Brussels, Belgium.

ROCK against Reaganomics 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!
NEW --Launching NOW! Outre Space Cinema -- Featuring: 1930's Rocketry, Spitfires of the Spaceways and Cellulose to Celluloid, Flash Gordon in the Saturday Matinees and Sunday Comics!





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: All students are FREE this year at the Hockaday Museum of Art, thanks to Pacific Steel & Recycling. I spent all Saturday afternoon there, doing necessary grunt-work.
Check out Fall for Glacier too -- a fundraiser for several programs that make Glacier National Park even better!

Media Watch: Metropolitan Opera LIVE -- Manon Lescaut by Giacomo Puccini from 1893. Let's see -- U.S. Premiere August 29, 1894; Metropolitan Opera Premiere January 18, 1907. Karita Mattila sang the title role. I heard the whole first act before going to work, plus Ms. Mattila's first aria in Act II. The plot features the same kind of sleazy tragedy that everyone held against Georges Bizet a generation earlier, and seemed to expect by the time Grand Opera faded in the 1920's. (Challenge -- if anyone's heard an opera as good as Turnadot written since then, tell ME about it! Les Miserables is DAMN GOOD, but another genre altogether.)

Updates for my OWN Media:


By command of Princess Aura, I added ONE more similarity between the Flash Gordon Sunday strip and 1936 Saturday serial.
(Click to see a larger image.)
Clockwise from Upper Left -- Alex Raymond's Aura as a traitor; Patrica Lawson's Aura, still besotted by lust for her blond Earthman, eavesdropping on Flash's inexplicable plans to escape her violent, dangerous planet. Next she'll sic a tiger on Jean Rogers' platinum version of Dale Arden; Raymond's dark-haired Dale, in a spitfire moment, as she defeats her long-time nemesis -- too late to avert disaster, unfortunately. Much later on, the two will join forces to spring Flash from Emperor Ming's prison.
Read the whole contrast/comparison at: Cellulose to Celluloid or check out the Further Misadventures of Princess Aura on its own.