Blue Big Skies, but thunderstorms are literally on the horizon. A Great Blue Heron swooped next to the house at Dry Bridge Slough, pursued by pesky Cowbirds -- leave him alone!

The muddy, runoff-swollen Flathead River flowing between abandoned bridge abutments at Holt Landing, near its confluence with Flathead Lake. Photo by ME -- Sunday, May 25, 2008.

Sitemeter Sez: Visitors from Engelskirchen, Germany; Jamaica, New York; El Cajon, California; West Chicago, Illinois; Tacoma, Washington and Winthrop, Massachusetts

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.





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: At the Hockaday Museum of Art we have Frank Tetrault's sculptures, and Greg Siple's playful photography A.K.A. Bicycle Eclectic. There's an opening tomorrow, and I have a lot of work to do there later today.
Check out Fall for Glacier -- a fundraiser for several programs that make Glacier National Park even better!

Media Watch: The Science Channel had a number of shows about Mars and it's checkered past of triumphs and disasters for exploratory spacecraft. I taped their coverage of Phoenix's successful landing near the north pole of Mars Sunday night.
The new Phoenix lander on Planet Mars, photographed by the Martian Orbiter:


Click to enlarge this NASA/JPL/University of Arizona image.
(Quotes from Bad Astronomy) The Phoenix lander is bluish and sits at the top of the field. You can see dust disturbed around it, no doubt from the exhaust of the landing thrusters as it descended. At the bottom is the bright parachute, and just above it is the back shell; the part of the apparatus that connected the parachute to the lander. To the right center is the heat shield, blackened by its fiery descent. It must have bounced when it hit, making the blurry splotch to the left of the better-defined shield itself.
For a sense of scale, the solar panels are about 5.5 meters (roughly 18 feet) tip to tip across the lander. That’s about 22 pixels in this image. That puts the (approximate) distances of the parts from the lander as 130 meters to the heat shield, 250 meters to the parachute, and 230 meters to the back shell...basically everything you’re seeing here would fit comfortably inside a couple of football stadiums.