OK, the weather lightened up -- Palm Sunday looked and felt like it should. There have been neighborhood Deer eating in the twilight now that the snow has melted off their range. I spent yesterday morning helping my next-door neighbor at Greendale Court burn the weed stubble off the banks of Dry Bridge Slough below our houses.

Thanks again to everyone who came by for Ada Lovelace Day. The most fun thing was when one of my dedicatees read it, and wrote a comment. Scroll down three posts to read my essay.

Sitemeter Sez: Visitors from Columbia Falls, Montana; Geneva, Ohio; The Dominican Republic; Oakland, California; Laval, Quebec; Middelburg, Holland; Worcester, UK; Lawrence, Massachusetts; Berlin, Connecticut; Slidell, Louisiana; East Greenwich, Rhode Island; Wyandanch, New York; Zagreb, Croatia; Somewhere in Morocco; East Berlin, Pennsylvania; Virginia Beach, Virginia; Toronto, Ontario; Greenwich, Connecticut; San Cristbal, Venezuela; Camden, South Carolina; San Francisco, California; Brooklyn, New York; Grand Blanc, Michigan; North Salt Lake, Utah; Brighton, UK (The famous seaside resort town); Hyde Park, New York; Norfolk, Virginia; Norwalk, California; Montreal, Quebec; Louth, Ireland; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Chicago, Illinois; Oradell, New Jersey; Beaconsfield, Quebec; Sainte-Thrse, Quebec; Grenoble, France; Hamburg, Germany; Kamas, Utah; Hartford, Connecticut; Montreal, Quebec; Neu Wulmstorf, Germany; Sacramento, California; Charleston, South Carolina, and Saint-Sauveur-des-Monts, Quebec.

Some more history 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!
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: Dan Fagre's show will come down for awhile, but will go up again in May at the Hockaday Museum of Art -- it is about the vanishing glaciers of Glacier National Park, and is a true labor of love by Fagre and other scientists from the USGS. Here's another website comparing glacier photos from the early 20th Century and recent decades. The Auction of Miniatures is up NOW -- get over there and bid -- the school shows are going up this week.

The FVCC Honors Symposium featured China Today by Eric Pei, our Fulbright Scholar-in-Residence / Visiting Professor from Liaoning University, Shenyang, China. Eric's speech was based on aspects of living in China -- both before 1979, and after the rise of pragmatic Deng Xiaoping, where things improved significantly for the average citizen.

Media Watch: Trash A Go Go has gone back to the the lousy idea of dance-off between their two worst couples -- too bad. The music is quite good, and much more varied than in other seasons. Cheryl and Gilles still seem to have the inside track.

Sublime & Ridiculous

Hedwig and the Angry Inch again by John Cameron Mitchell (Hedwig), with music and lyrics by Stephen Trask. I've learned a little more about it since I first raved about the film on this blog a few years back -- it is still Rock and Roll at its most expressive, with heartbreaking humor and metaphorical truth echoing throughout the whole thing.

The Dark Knight (2008) written and directed by Christopher Nolan from the various interpretations of Batman over the last generation. Frank Miller's Dark Knight re-created that old superhero during the 80's, and many people were inspired by the metamorphosis. Three lines up from the bottom of the credits is a welcome acknowledgement of Jerry Robinson, who turned the amateur work of teenagers Bob Kane and Bill Finger into a professional production, and helped create a cultural icon.
The late Heath Ledger dominated the whole movie with his portrayal of The Joker as a demented super-sociopath, and deserved his postumous Academy Award. Unfortunately, there wasn't much in this movie for Ledger to dominate. Harvey (Two Face) Dent was woven in as a sub-plot. Nolan spent a lot of money on special effects and actors, but his dialog was outright awful most of the time and the plot was dull and interminable and unfocused and capricious and distracted and didn't make sense and had more holes than material and couldn't come to a point and lacked suspense and wasn't funny enough to punctuate the violence and cruelty and ran on like a poorly - constructed sentence, leaving the audience hanging in the air like Joker, or stranded on ferries in the East Gotham River. I'm afraid even a lowly comic book editor would have taken a razor knife to Nolan's writing, and maybe made a call to Frank Miller or even Jerry Robinson for help. I'll make a partial, but sincere, list of better comic book movies than this one: X-Men I, II, and III; Fantastic Four I and II; Iron Man; Spider Man I, II, and III; Superman Returns; Tank Girl; Daredevil; Tim Burton's Batman, and even Ang Lee's deeply-flawed Hulk.

Batman punches out The Joker in 1942 -- cover art by Fred Ray (layout) and Jerry Robinson. Image from http://www.comics.org