A warm weekend at last! The Geese and Mallards have produced swimming chicks at Dry Bridge Slough.

Sitemeter Sez: Gdansk, Poland; Oakland, California (Hello Caroline & Matt!); Salt Lake City, Utah; Albuquerque, New Mexico; Bors, Sweden; Peoria, Arizona; Maisons-Alfort, Ile-de-France and Tacoma, Washington.

Web Pages: I have finished another page of Mime Troupe history, and will post it very soon. This phase involves making links, and minor corrections to other pages. Look for a link under Exuberant Daze & Nights (IIc) in Theatre X-Net (below)

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.

Space, the Final Frontier: OK, I watched Star Trek when it was new, liking some episodes, but disliking most of them. I still signed the famous petition which kept it on the air for a third season, and repaid me in Tribbles. The 60's were a Golden Age of Science Fiction in print, and Roddenberry's show was adolescent and regressive in comparison. However, it was better than almost every other Space Opera which had been tried on TV. The entertainment industry had taken thirty years to match the brash, but dumb, Flash Gordon serials, but Star Trek wasn't nearly as dumb, though. Its special effects were respectable for the time, and the acting wasn't all that bad. Compared with drek like Lost In Space, it was Champagne versus Ripple. When I was forced to watch Trek in syndication, I perceived many other qualities that made it enjoyable -- especially in the interactions among the cast.
I mostly enjoyed the Star Trek movies -- their strengths and weaknesses were the same as the TV show. I shall pass on expressing my observations about Next Generation etc. Patrick Stewart is a very fine actor, though, and made baldness sexy -- a feat not even Sean Connery could accomplish! I'm not all that excited about seeing Star Trek with a new cast playing the old characters -- I can wait, and probably WILL wait for quite awhile. They don't need my money anyway, that new movie is a hit.

What is REALLY going on out in Space?

A remarkable photo of Space Shuttle Atlantis approaching the Hubble Space Telescope, silhouetted against the Sun, taken May 13, 2009 through a 13 cm telescope at 1/8000th of second by astronomer Thierry Legault. Atlantis is on a maintenence and repair mission for Hubble this week.

On May 14, the European Space Agency successfully launched space observatories Herschel and Planck. This image was made from a video taken by a one-meter tracking ’scope in the Canary Islands, showing the two spacecraft together with the Sylda launch vehicle gliding across the sky a few hours after the two observatories separated from the vehicle. (The two bright objects are Herschel and Planck, and the dimmer one is the Sylda.)
Condensed from Phillip Plait's Bad Astronomy blog.