Many rainy days still -- spring showers, though. I've mowed my lawn twice this season, since it tends to clear up in the afternoon.

Sitemeter Sez: Atlanta, Georgia; Bern, Switzerland; Columbia Falls, Montana; Louth, Ireland; Atlanta, Georgia; Somerville, Massachusetts; Boston, Massachusetts; Brighton, UK; Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island; Oakland, California; Calgary, Alberta; Los Angeles, California; Saint Petersburg, Russia; New Bern, North Carolina; Orange, France; Herndon, Virginia; Helena, Montana; Madrid, Spain; Warrenton, Oregon, and Auckland, New Zealand.

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: Seldom Seen II and Larry Johnson's photos of local characters. Montana On The Move, New Artists, are on display at the Hockaday Museum of Art.
Dan Fagre's show has come down for awhile, but will go up again next week -- 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: Between Love and Marriage -- was a fairly well-acted movie featuring Urmilla Matondkar (2001). I've noticed that she plays "crazy" pretty well for such a beautiful woman. She portrayed a model, which meant lots of cheesecake, and did some fancy dancing too. It was NOT an exploitation flick by any stretch of the imagination, though. All the characters had dignity.
The Hulk II (2008) starred ex-comic book editor Stan Lee as a hapless victim of Gamma poisoning from a Brazilian soft drink. Oh wait -- that was just a short cameo. Sonofagun's been in about every Marvel superhero flick since the 90's. I remember when Bob Oksner satirized him as Stan Bragg in DC's Angel and the Ape circa 1970. He's loudly promoted Marvel superheroes since about 1941, when he went to work for his cousin, publisher Martin Goodman.
The rest of the movie wasn't bad, and even captured some of the old Marvel Comics magic in its continuity. Edward Norton played wimpy Bruce Banner well, and Liv Tyler did alright as beleagured Betty Ross. Gil Kane's "Abomination," another Gamma-metamorphosed creature, emerged from the magazines and video games as one of the villains in this sequel to Ang Lee's interpretation of Hulk from a few years back. It was a better visualized effort, I'll admit -- looks like someone is planning a future Avengers movie, since Robert Downey Jr. makes a closing appearance as Tony (Iron Man) Stark. How they'll do it, I'm not sure, but it will take the introduction of a couple more characters. If the Marvel cinema franchise can hold the public's interest for another generation, it will be fun to see. In fact, the franchise will fail UNLESS the public continues to have fun seeing these Comic Book Movies! (Wonder how Wolverine is doing?)

Avengers Assemble!

The Avengers series started to get interesting when Stan Lee and Jack Kirby reintroduced Captain America, literally frozen in time. I once had a conversation with Jack about these days, when he competed head-to-head with well-established DC Comics and their Superman/Batman books, not to mention their own successful updates of Flash, Green Lantern, Atom, and the Justice League.
"I wanted to take their readership away from them!" Kirby said, "And managed to do it after a couple of years."
As a consumer, before I ever met Kirby, I enjoyed the freshness of Marvel Comics in my early teens, especially the continuity between various magazines which helped establish an imaginative sub-world that was unique to their productions. Years later, when I started collecting back issues, this particular comic was one of my first major "finds" in a used book store.
Art by Jack Kirby and George Roussos (as George Bell) 1963-64