Whitetail Deer are still living around here -- a spiked buck was eating alongside Woodland Avenue last night. Blue Jays and Chickadees were spotted over the weekend by the slough.

Sitemeter Sez: Visitors from Mitchellstown, Victoria; Jamaica, New York; Bridgewater, Massachusetts; Manchester, Michigan; Brisbane, Queensland; Toronto, Ontario; Santiago, Chile; Winnipeg, Manitoba; Carlsbad, California; Eugene, Oregon; Orlando, Florida; Londrina, Brazil; South Gardiner, Maine; Richmond, Texas; Hamilton, Ontario; Pinellas Park, Florida; Round Lake, Illinois; Lake Worth, Florida; Washington, D.C; Toronto, Ontario; Los Alamitos, California; Oakland, California; Rio de Janeiro, Brazil; Droitwich, Worcestershire; Stockholm, Sweden; Portland, Oregon, and Jyvskyl, Finland.

New revisions 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 including my efforts on his Flash Gordon Resources Page -- along with actual creators like Alex Raymond, Al Williamson, and others!


Charity Alert: Play the FreeRice Game -- improve your vocabulary, and donate food to the United Nations. 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. BTW -- AIDtoCHILDREN.com is a bit simpler than FreeRice Game.

In The Community: The Hockaday Museum of Art's Autumn Salon, with 116 pieces on display. We also have Crown of the Continent and Ace of Diamonds gracing our walls. Looks like another art run to Eastern Montana in mid-December.

Media Watch: The Beatles AKA "The White Album" was released FORTY years ago. It was a double-record set full of new material by the most popular entertainers on the planet. Magical Mystery Tour preceeded it, but it was primarily a collection of singles -- some very adventurous singles like Strawberry Fields, Penny Lane, and I Am The Walrus, but some half-baked clunkers too. It was definitely an anticlimax after 1967's masterpiece, Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band. The Fab Four had succeeded in 1966 with a similar idea called Yesterday and Today, between Rubber Soul and Revolver, but Mystery just wasn't very strong. For this reason, and others, A new Beatles album was eagerly anticipated by many millions of music fans. I was one of them, and enjoyed this sprawling production over many years -- mostly because of the variety of its tracks. It is supposedly The Beatles best-selling album, according to the White Album Listening Party running on Montana Public Radio. There's been a lot said about that record, but I'm going to try to convey my perceptions from the days when it was new:
I remember my first time listening to "White Album" as a whole -- it was also my first quarter at college, and I was driving up to the University of Utah Library on a gray Sunday to study for a Monday exam, when Rock and Roll stalwart KNAK AM Radio announced it would track through the whole four-sided record less than a week after it's official release. I delayed studying for two hours, (KNAK ran news and commercials as well) while DJ Gary Waldron introduced the latest Beatle music to me, and the whole Salt Lake Valley. I wasn't really alone in that car -- many thousands were listening too.
Side Four
1. "Revolution 1" -- "Wooley" Waldron started with this for some reason. This is a slower, chunkier version of John Lennon's brash single from the summer of '68.
2. "Honey Pie" -- Paul McCartney's music-hall loon-outs were fresh and fun then.
3. "Savoy Truffle" -- George Harrison had a wit about him, and "you are what you eat" was a popular catch-phrase of the time.
4. "Cry Baby Cry" -- is and was unmemorable. I was NOT smoking pot that day.
5. "Revolution 9" -- Waldron skipped this one, but we listeners made him pay by requesting it for the next two years -- a real mish-mash that only seemed to make sense if you were stoned. (What a good excuse!)
6. "Good Night" -- Wooley played it last, although it was only 2 in the afternoon when he finished.
Side One
1. "Back in the U.S.S.R." -- The Beatles were always a good Rock & Roll band.
2. "Dear Prudence" This song is much deeper than the opening cut.
3. "Glass Onion" I enjoyed the various references, but I couldn't figure out if Lennon was saying something or nothing. I often confused this song with Savoy Truffle.
4. "Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" -- An immediate favorite of mine. I fancied myself a bass player at the time, and played along with this one when I bought my own copy.
5. "Wild Honey Pie" -- The DJ may have skipped this cut too -- it's just filler.
6. "The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill" -- Satire on the Imperial mindset by Lennon. Of course he wasn't pointing out our own society's hypocrisy was he?
7. "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" -- George Harrison hit his stride with this song.
8. "Happiness Is a Warm Gun" -- Is it OK to laugh, John? I wasn't really sure.
Side Two
1. "Martha My Dear" -- Sixteenth-inch deep McCartney cuteness.
2. "I'm So Tired" -- Another well-crafted Lennon downer, from the author of Help!
3. "Blackbird" -- McCartney at his best. A very pleasant listening experience.
4. "Piggies" -- Harrison could do satire too, and we'd all read Animal Farm.
5. "Rocky Raccoon" -- Everybody laughed at this one, especially the dig at Dylan.
6. "Don't Pass Me By" -- Ringo seemed to be a fun guy, and his songs were fun too.
7. "Why Don't We Do It in the Road?" -- The biggest laugh on the album.
8. "I Will" -- When McCartney was good, he was VERY good!
9. "Julia" -- The DJ reminded all of us that Julia was the name of Lennon's mother.
Side Three
1. "Birthday" -- Another big laugher, followed by ...
2. "Yer Blues" -- Merrie Ole John Lennon, inviting us to laugh once more, as he screamed in near-mortal musical agony. (See below)
3. "Mother Nature's Son" -- Never liked this one, sorry Paul.
4. "Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except Me and My Monkey" -- I 'got' the drug reference, and was happy to rock-out after McCartney's dull spot, but I thought John Lennon was kidding -- he wasn't.
5. "Sexy Sadie" -- Lennon could be boring too.
6. "Helter Skelter" -- Paul McCartney's turn to ROCK! He outdid himself here.
7. "Long, Long, Long" -- Harrison got stuck behind Helter Skelter.

So KNAK's Gary (Wooley) Waldron finally played "Good Night," and I went off to study -- Damn if I know which subject it happened to be after all this time, but I've always remembered that Sunday!

I've never regretted a single visit I've made to a library, even the solitary trip described above. The library at the University of Utah was big, and is bigger still today, but I solidified my education there. It really didn't take long before I enjoyed some very good times at college -- the actual U of U Library is the background for this assemblage of 60's era dancers, looking much like me and my friends, enjoying each others' company. We played as hard as we worked, and you can safely bet at least one Beatles song roared out of those unseen speakers!