No bloody wind from the northwest today -- gray and raining, but Springlike. Canadian Geese are nesting next to the slough.

Sitemeter Sez: Greensboro, North Carolina; Berkeley Springs, West Virginia (Searching for my musical friend, the late Wanda Day -- read more HERE); Lindon, Utah; Burton, Washington; Audubon, Minnesota; Gainesville, Florida; Paris, France; Lindon, Utah; Dundalk, Maryland and San Diego, California.

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 -- UPDATED!





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

In The Community: George Gogas Reception and gallery walk TONIGHT at the Hockaday Museum of Art, plus our annual Children's Show, and local High School Art Show.
Check out Fall for Glacier -- a fundraiser for several programs that make Glacier National Park even better!

Media Watch: Trash A Go Go -- Marlee Matlin's miraculous run is over. She proved that a profoundly deaf person can dance, and enjoy the experience too. She is also a living embodiment of what determination can accomplish.
Mario and Karina did NOT belong in the bottom two -- Derek and Shannon's dance was one of the worst on Monday. (Their pathetic whining might have made a difference with the viewers.) I'm glad that the music on the show is good again.
Real Books -- I can't believe I read this thing, but I did -- Heroes: From Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar to Churchill and de Gaulle by Paul Johnson. The author might have had a higher-class British education, but this book is no better than an average post on a blog site. His historical scholarship is erroneous, superficial, or "rum," as the English say. I learned a few things about cruel, manipulative Mary of Guise, mother of Mary (Queen of Scots) Stewart, but most of the book was shallow rumination at best, and right-wing propaganda at worst.

Tall (5' 11") and reportedly beautiful Mary Stewart circa 1570 (redigitized by ME) -- she kinda looks like her mom, but some other pictures seem to resemble her older cousin Elizabeth Tudor. Already-stylized European portraiture was seriously afflicted by the Catholic/Protestant wars of the Sixteenth Century.


As Great-Granddaughter of Henry VII, some of Mary's aristocratic genes reside in the British royal family today. Henry VII's Granddaughter Elizabeth I had no children, and Mary's estranged son James was elevated to the throne. The maternal lines of the Normans, Plantagenets, Lancasters, Yorks, Tudors, Stewarts, Hanovers, and Saxe/Colburg/Gotha/Windsor/Battenbergs never failed. Princess Diana Spencer herself was descended from the Stewarts through a mistress of Charles II -- that unchaste fox-hound fathered over a dozen illegitimate pups, but neglected to produce an heir to his throne. That means Diana's sons William and Harry are related to Henry VII through BOTH sides of their family tree, and their parents weren't even cousins! (Inter-familial marriage is/was all-too-common in their old man's genealogy.)
Henry Tudor really became king because most of his royal relatives wanted the fratricidal War of the Roses to end. Tudor was the Great (times three) Grandson of Edward III. Like Diana, his mother Maragret Beaufort was from a once-illegitimate branch of the royal family tree, raised up to nobility. Margaret's ancestor was John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, son of Edward III, and father of usurper Henry IV, but by another relationship. Tudor was also Henry VI's nephew, once removed, because his father was one of the king's two half-brothers.
Catherine of France, the king's mother, ran away with commoner Owen Tudor after he liberated her from a gilded prison where she'd been forcibly separated from the royal heir of Henry V, who had died at war soon after his son was born. The Tudor clan was only related to the Lancaster kings by marriage, but they were given lands and titles, fighting against the House of York in return.
Once Henry VII entered into a marriage contract with Elizabeth, daughter of his late blood-enemy Edward IV of York, and they started having children, then marrying them into other royal families, Tudor legitimacy was established.
All of these battling Plantagenet kindred were descendants of William the Conquerer's granddaughter Matilda, whose son Henry II survived a similar blue-bloodbath to inherit the Norman Dynasty.

My own ancestors were fortunate if they became merchant captains on the cold seas off Norway, Scotland, and Wales. A few others were simple agriculturalists or townspeople in Germany or Switzerland. I'm glad my Northern European forebearers moved to America, where their ancestry did not necessarily determine their social class among other European immigrants.