I'm seeing more Deer at Dry Bridge Slough -- especially in the twilight. Real snow yesterday, with attendant slickness in the morning, and melting/draining in the afternoon. It is foggy where I am right now -- the trees are coated with hoar-frost.

Sitemeter Sez: Visitors from Grand Prairie, Texas; Vienna, Austria; Memphis, Tennessee; Puerto Ayacucho, Venezuela; Toronto, Ontario; Kingston, New York, and Oakland, California.

Check out: 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 UPDATES! Outre Space Cinema -- Featuring: 1930's Rocketry, Spitfires of the Spaceways and especially 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 has two new shows -- Seldom Seen, from the Permanent Collection, and First Nations Artists -- Contemporary / Traditional. We still have Crown of the Continent, and Ace of Diamonds. Dan Fagre's show about the vanishing glaciers of Glacier National Park is a true labor of love by himself and other scientists from the USGS. Here's another website comparing glacier photos from the early 20th Century and now.

Media Watch: I saw The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) -- Good acting all around, especially by Cate Blanchett, Julia Ormond, Taraji P. Henson, Tilda Swinton, and Brad Pitt. At first, I was impressed by its originality. The good-hearted fantasy elements got to me right away. My "willing suspension of disbelief" sank with Captain Mike's Gulf Coast tugboat (and a Nazi submarine) in Murmansk, USSR, though.
Tilda Swinton and Cate Blanchett DID resemble each other in this flick -- something about the set of their cheekbones. However, I didn't buy for a second the idea that the former was exceedingly plain and latter was exceedingly beautiful. (see below) Stagecraft, makeup, and special effects were central to the success of Benjamin Button, and these elements mostly worked well.
Sadly, Hollywood cliches made a wreck of what could have been a unique movie. There were about fifty minutes of unnecessary dreck which made the movie too long, and ridiculous, rather than fantastic. The worst decision was setting the storytelling sequences in a New Orleans hospital during the approach of Hurricane Katrina. Exploiting that all-too-real tragedy contributed NOTHING to the film.

(L to R) Actors Cate Blanchett and Tilda Swindon