That new snow is melting fast! We had rain last night, which froze all over everything, so the morning drive was hazardous as HELL.

Sitemeter Sez: Visitors from Dodge, Nebraska; Farnham, Quebec; Kissimmee, Florida (George Clinton? Stephanie Clinton?); Tewksbury, Massachusetts; Fairhaven, Massachusetts; Courcouronnes, France; Louth, Ireland (stuck around and caught up); Montreal, Quebec; City of London, UK; Winter Park, Florida; Chandler, Arizona; Los Angeles, California; Toronto, Ontario, and Bozeman, Montana.

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!
MORE UPDATES! Outre Space Cinema -- Featuring: 1930's Rocketry, Spitfires of the Spaceways and especially Cellulose to Celluloid, Even more Flash Gordon comparisons from 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. HURRY! Things will be changing soon.

This upcoming Thursday in FVCC's Honors Symposium is Chinese Foreign Policy—China Shakes the World by Dr. Steven Levine, associate director of the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Center at The University of Montana.
The remaining lectures of the series include:
March 12 — “China’s Strategic Relations—Short Arms/Slow Legs” presented by Brigadier General Russ Howard, retired, Maureen and Mike Mansfield Center, The University of Montana;
March 19 — “China’s Economy — The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” presented by Dr. Terry Weidner, Maureen and Mike Mansfield Center, The University of Montana;
March 26 — “Communist China — The Cultural Revolution” presented by Major Kwok Chiu, United States Military Academy at West Point;
April 2 — “China Today” presented by Eric Pei, FVCC Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence; Visiting Professor, Liaoning University, Shenyang, China.

Media Watch: Man On Wire (2008), an Academy Award winner for documentary film. I happen to know Phillipe Petit, the person at the center of the whole thing, who balanced the Oscar statuette on his chin. I hung out with him for about a week during the summer of 1983 in Denver, Colorado -- almost a decade after he became famous for wire-walking between the twin towers of New York's Trade Center for most of an hour. He had gone to Jacques LeCoq's school and knew Paddy, Rod, and Margret from Footsbarn Theatre. I thought the main power of the movie came from the audacity of Phillipe's incomparable feat. There was a lot of craft involved in pulling the scattered contemporary films together and creating credible reenactments of key events, though. I would have liked it better if the filmmakers would have sketched out the next 35 years of Petit's career, or even his community service "punishment" -- a wire-walk over Belvedere Lake/Turtle Pond in Central Park. One criticism I'd level at the film is that it ended too abruptly.

Pay No Attention To That Crazy Frenchman Up Above!

Click to see a larger image.
(L to R) Gregg Moore, Rod Goodall, and Patrick "Paddy" Haytor at the International Theater Festival, Denver, Colorado in 1983; Margaret Beyiere, Rod, and Paddy in Amsterdam, Holland 1976; Joe Cunningham and Margaret in Denver 1983. After getting big bucks for one high-wire performance, Phillipe Petit stuck around, doing street theater for spare change, while renewing friendships with his peers, and meeting prospective employers. He gave me a high-five one night at an outdoor party when I got an American keg working after so many Europeans failed. I became de facto bartender that evening, but I never understood why they wanted to drink that lousy Coors anyway.