It rained yesterday, and is raining today -- GOOD!

Sitemeter Sez: Stockholm, Sweden (looking at Ida's biography); Columbia Falls, Montana; Herndon, Virginia; Amsterdam, Holland; Austin, Texas; Indianapolis, Indiana; Nice, France, and Soldotna, Alaska.

NEW Mime Troupe Saga Chapter 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

Many thanks to Toni -- 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!




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: 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!

Tears and Laughter about our broken health care system HERE

Media Watch: Montana Public Radio was doing a '40th Anniversary of Woodstock' listening party the last two nights -- first time I've ever heard the Creedence Clearwater Revival set.

During that actual weekend in 1969, I was working on the railroad at a mining company near Salt Lake City. It was about 95 degrees day and night all that month. We were having convectional thunderstorms, and the engines needed traction sand, so I was shoveling that stuff in the murderous heat. It sure helped being 20 years old.
During rest/breathe/water breaks, I read Zorba the Greek, which is about back-breaking work and mining, among other things.
Thanks to Crawdaddy and Rolling Stone, I was VERY aware of what was going on 3000 miles away. The following three-disc album and film affected the whole country for much of the next year.

My Digital Evocation of Younger Days:


We celebrated life with music and dancing at the University of Utah many times in those days -- besides demonstrating for what was right. Beat the heck outta shoveling sand!