Sitemeter Sez: Dubrovnic, Croatia; Fayetteville, North Carolina; Barcelona, Spain; Choteau, Montana; Hamburg, Germany; Erie, Colorado; Bippus, Indiana, and Saint Petersburg, Russia.
MORE New Mime Troupe 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: Arts In The Park is over for this year, and the waether was perfect! Mark Ogle's remarkable retrospective is still up at the Hockaday Museum of Art, plus Dan Fagre and Lisa McKeon's show is on the first level -- about the vanishing glaciers of Glacier National Park, it is a true labor of love by scientists from the USGS. Here's another website comparing glacier photos from the early 20th Century and recent decades.
The Hockaday Museum of Art's Face Book Site (There's a link to the conventional website there.)
I was running the tech for guest speaker Joseph Lisle Williams when he presented a lecture at my college about surviving a bear attack in Glacier National Park 50 years ago. Don Dayton, the ranger who shot the bear and saved the young man's life was at the event too. If you want to read more about it, his sister wrote a blog about her brother and the lecture HERE.
The other month, I ran sound for Carol Buchanan's public discussion of her historical novel God's Thunderbolt -- The Vigilantes of Montana at the community college. Here's the link to a live-blog of the event.
A statewide "town meeting" style videoconference about the USA's health care crisis. There were many advocates from different political views, and a few ignoramuses, but the consensus was clear: No more bankruptcies or losing homes because of injury or illness!
Speaking of health care:
Dear Mr. President by Hunter Sat Jul 25, 2009 at 02:20:04 PM PDT from Daily Kos
Dear Mr. President: I am writing you today because I am outraged at the notion of involving government in healthcare decisions like they do in other countries. I believe healthcare decisions should be between myself and my doctor.
Well, that is not strictly true. I believe healthcare decisions should be between myself, my doctor, and my insurance company, which provides me a list of which doctors I can see, which specialists I can see, and has a strict policy outlining when I can and can't see those specialists, for what symptoms, and what tests my doctors can or cannot perform for a given set of symptoms. That seems fair, because the insurance company needs to make a profit; they're not in the business of just keeping people alive for free.
Oh, and also my employer. My employer decides what health insurance company and plans will be available to me in the first place. If I quit that job and find another, my heath insurance will be different, and I may or may not be able to see the same doctor as I had been seeing before, or receive the same treatments, or obtain the same medicines. So I believe my healthcare decisions should be between myself, the company I work for, my insurance company, and my doctor. Assuming I'm employed, which is a tough go in the current economy.
Hmm, but that's still a little simplistic. I suppose we should clarify.
More Tears and Laughter HERE
Many thanks to Toni Bentley -- she sent me an autographed copy of Winter Season; A Dancer's Journal (1982) for making a video of her presentation at Harvard University about Ida Rubinstein, High Patroness of Our Blog. Toni is not just a Class Act, she is Class in and of itself, and that's no act!
Media Watch: Bollywood movies are excellent for pitting and freezing cherries. The goofy plots and magnificent music spectacles are easy to catch up with, and the high standards of acting make for some surprises when the stars make more of their sometimes stupid roles than the writers intended. I've written about Bobolli and Bunti before -- good entertainment with Rani Mukerji and the Bachchan Clan. Shah Rukh Khan led a very good cast in a hyper-colorful soap-opera flick set in New York City called Kal Ho Naa Ho [Tomorrow May Never Come] (2003) Saif Ali Khan and Preity Zinta did wonderful work turning their ridiculous roles into warm characters. I actually enjoyed the Bollywood-ized version of Pretty Woman near the beginning of the film. Another movie set in exotic London was I See You (2006), starring the very talented Arjun Rampal. The plot was f***ing stupid, but I enjoyed the locales and musical numbers a lot. Comic actor Chunky Pandey actually had some good moments too. Beautiful Urmila Matondkar was excellent in the not-particularly-great movie Banaras (2006) with handsome Ashmit Patel as the Urmila's doomed lover. The film shot high -- that religion itself does not protect us from human folly is a worthy theme, and the scenes of nearby Sarnath, where Siddhārtha Gautama Buddha found enlightenment, were beautiful, not to mention Benares or Varanasi, the great city of a thousand temples itself as a background. The veteran cast did as well as anybody could, but I did not think the script really redeemed any of its good ideas, though.
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