The weather stayed on the cold side, with occasional snow flurries. A small herd of Deer haunts South Woodland Drive, and the Osprey are trying to live on fingerling fish out of Dry Bridge Pond.

Sitemeter Sez: Colorado Springs, Colorado; New York City, New York; Dortmund, Germany; Kassel, Germany; City of London, UK; Castle Rock, Colorado; Naperville, Illinois; Gainesville, Florida; Anchorage, Alaska, and Staten Island, New York.

MUCH 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: Montana On The Move, New Artists, and The Auction of Miniatures are up NOW at the Hockaday Museum of Art, but we're moving everything down to the Hilton next Friday to sell it all, and putting up a portrait exhibit in its place, including Larry Johnson's photos of local characters. (Starting later today.) Dan Fagre's show has come down for awhile, but will go up again in May -- 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.

Media Watch: I saw two versions of the Bollywood crime drama Don -- the original (1978) starring Amitabh Bachchan, and a remake (2006) with Shah Rukh Khan. Hmmm -- looks like the latter actor is doing Don 2, due for release in 2010. I liked the '78 movie much more -- the ridiculousness of its plot was redeemed by the supporting cast, and several ingenious touches during certain scenes. There's a sprawling messiness in classic Bollywood that I find charming. Refining that energy in modern times tends to expose logical flaws, even though the filmmakers try to compensate with technological sleight-of-hand. Bollywood is best at sentiment and romanticism, in my opinion, and I thought the '78 movie carried off these elements better. The large, looming prescence of Bachchan made things more convincing too.
I like Shah Rukh Khan quite a lot, comparing him favorably with Cary Grant, which is high praise indeed. Prolific Amitahb is much like India's James Stewart, and can play rough guys very well when the script calls for it. Khan wasn't a near as compelling as a sociopathic gangster. BTW -- ex-male model Arjun Rampal was excellent in the '06 film, as well as Kareena Kapoor as one of Don's early victims, but the original actors were awesome too!

Arjun Rampal as a sympathetic high-tech cat burglar in 2006's version of Don, filmed among the high-rise buildings of Kuala Lampur, Malaysia. He was a fairly good villain in Shah Rukh Khan's production Om Shanti Om the next year.