Hot and dry -- glad my neighbor buzzed my lawn while I was gone and watered a little. The valley had a mosquito infestation because of the slow spring -- five years of eggs hatched in the high waters. (Really BITES when that happens!) Things are better since I got back -- saw a large male Deer at the slough, and was greeted by circling Ospreys.

Sitemeter Sez: Visitors from Saint Louis, Missouri; El Cajon, California; Austin, Texas; Brooklyn, New York; Vienna, Austria; Aalsmeer, Holland; Kansas City, Missouri; Rocklin, California; Ardmore, Alabama; Dollard-des-Ormeaux, Quebec; Flagstaff, Arizona and Buenos Aires, Argentina.

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: The Hockaday Museum of Art's has Rails, Trails, and A Road -- honoring the 75th Anniversary of Going To The Sun Road in Glacier National Park.
My boss also loaded up two more galleries with Ace Powell -- Ace of Diamonds and Native American Interpretations while I was away.
Check out Fall for Glacier -- a fundraiser for several programs that make Glacier National Park even better!

Media Watch: Montana PBS has been carrying the Butte Folk Festival LIVE all weekend -- excellent stuff! Shemekia Copeland from Sirius Satellie Radio performed with her Blues band -- she announced this gig over the air when I listened to her broadcast three weekends ago.

I purchased Funkadelic's By Way of the Drum from a little record store near "Punjabi Village" on Main Street in Vancouver B.C. It is a reclamation of the abandoned MCA project from 1989, put out on an obscure offshoot of Geffin Records called Hip O Select dot Com. Lots of Dwayne McKnight on guitar, plus the great Eddie Hazel. Other funkers include Garry Shider, Mallia Franklin, Donnie Sterling, Tracy Lewis, keyboardists David (Chong) Spradley, and Joseph "Amp" Fiddler. The music is absolutely fabulous!

Get Up and DANCE!

Bollywood movie star Urmila Matondkar is a remarkable dancer, and has studied acting and film-making all of her life -- she's a popular pinup, but there is much more to her than just good looks.

Speaking of Punjabi Village, we bought a load of Bollywood movies there -- plus scored big in a library sale downtown where they were dumping East Indian DVDs. We saw a couple of good ones, but our first was called Daud -- and we re-christened it Dud after an hour or so. The cast was very good -- led by Sanjay Duit and Urmila Matondkar, but the material was insultingly trite, and lacked the essential spark of ingenuity that makes screwball comedies work.

More of British Columbia!

A composite of two separate photos from the Olympic Nordic Center near Whistler, B.C. about July 4, 2008. That is a real bear, and a sign warning all of us that it, and its family, live in the same area.