Lots of puddles and ice dams from the messy ice storm yesterday.

Sitemeter Sez: Visitors from Lubbock, Texas (reading about Buddy Holly and old Rock and Roll, I bet); Cluj, Romania; Louth, Ireland; Dubai (Hi Hi Hi, Chris, Roseanna, and/or Rachelle); United Arab Emirates; Stavanger, Norway, and Farmington, Michigan.

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 Seldom Seen, from the Permanent Collection, First Nations Artists -- Contemporary / Traditional, Crown of the Continent, and Ace of Diamonds. Dan Fagre's new 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: Lucia di Lammermoor (1835) by Gaetano Donizetti on the Met Opera broadcast today -- sonic heaven if you like Bel Canto opera. (Me! Me!)
Text in Italian by Salvatore Cammarano after Sir Walter Scott's novel The Bride of Lammermoor; Conductor: Marco Armiliato; Lucia: Anna Netrebko; (Bravo! Bravo!); Edgardo: Rolando Villazón; Enrico: Mariusz Kwiecien; Raimondo: Ildar Abdrazakov;
Housecleaning is easy with I Love Crazee Lucy! on the radio.
(There's no sex in THIS sextette.)
Chi mi frena in tal momento?
EDGARDO:
Who restrains me at such a moment?
Who disrupts the course of anger?
Her misery, her terror
are proof of remorse!
But, like a wilted rose,
she hangs between life and death...
I am vanquished... I am shocked!...
I love you, thankless one, I love you still!
ENRICO:
Who restrains my fury,
the hand that reaches for the sword?
But for the unhappy girl there rises
in my breast sounds of sympathy!
She is of my blood! I have betrayed her,
she hangs between life and death...
Oh, that I am not able to stifle
the remorse in my heart.
LUCIA:
I hoped that my life,
had ended all my fears...
But death has not come to help me,
I live still, to my torment!
The veil has fallen from my eyes,
earth and heaven have both betrayed me!
I want to weep, but I cannot...
Even tears have forsaken me.
RAIMONDO, ARTURO:
What an awful moment!
All words fail me...
Heavy clouds [veils] of terror
seem to hide the sun's rays!
Like a wilted rose
she hangs between life and death...
Whoever is not deeply moved by her
has a tiger's heart in his breast.
ELISA, CORO, RAIMONDO, ARTURO:
Like a wilted rose
Like a wilted rose ...

Spoiler: Everybody DIES! Well, most of 'em, anyway.

Here's a weird case -- (Quoted from The Associated Press)
BOSTON — A street artist famous for his red, white and blue "Hope" posters of President Obama has been arrested on warrants accusing him of tagging property with graffiti, police said Saturday. Shepard Fairey was arrested Friday night on his way to the Institute of Contemporary Art for a kickoff event for his first solo exhibition, called "Supply and Demand..."
... The museum said Fairey was released a few hours after his arrest...
Here's what makes it weird --
(The image used in Fairey's red, white and blue "Hope" posters of President Obama) is the subject of a copyright dispute with The Associated Press. Fairey argues his use of the AP photo is protected by "fair use," which allows exceptions to copyright laws based on, among other factors, how much of the original is used, what the new work is used for and how the original is affected by the new work.

Right Wing Political Retribution?
A transformed digital portrait of entrepreneur/guerilla artist Shepard Fairey, and his iconic HOPE poster, admittedly derived from a fraction of an AP news photograph, which coincidently included movie star George Clooney at a Washington hearing sitting alongside then-Senator Obama. The photo was old news, and forgotten, before Fairey reinterpreted it, a circumstance which may change with AP's lawsuit. YOU can make a similar transformation at ObamIcon.Me
Whatever anyone thinks about Fairey's artistic merits, he sure tuned-in to a major resonator in our society, and his imagery helped make a change. (BTW -- I ain't payin' ya' NOTHING for this picture, Shep!)