The late winter weather has been fairly gentle, so we went to Canada to find some cold temperatures. It was around zero degrees (F!) when I stood in line to buy thermal underwear at the Hudson Bay store on Banff Avenue.

Banff National Park from a roadside lookout over the Bow River, February 15, 2009.

Sitemeter Sez: Visitors from Berlin,Germany; Cleveland, Ohio; Breaux Bridge, Louisiana; Mountain View, California; Bombay, India; Porto Alegre, Brazil; Louth, Ireland; Saint Martinville, Louisiana; Sterling Heights, Michigan; Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, and Calgary, Alberta.

Check out: 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!
NEW 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: The Hockaday Museum of Art has Seldom Seen, from the Permanent Collection, First Nations Artists -- Contemporary / Traditional, Crown of the Continent, and Ace of Diamonds. Dan Fagre's new show about the vanishing glaciers of Glacier National Park is a true labor of love by himself and other scientists from the USGS. Here's another website comparing glacier photos from the early 20th Century and now.

Media Watch: Dreams From My Father (1994) by now-President Barack Obama on DVD while traveling in the car -- read by the author. Our president has a talent for accents and idioms that I wasn't aware of before.
The details of his story came alive when his warm voice evoked Hawaii, Indonesia, the urban USA, and finally Nairobi, plus the Luo region of Kenya, by vividly describing the lives of the people who LIVE in these far-flung places. His keynote speech from the 2004 Democratic Convention was also on the CD, as well as an excellent Prologue and Afterword.

Barack Hussein Obama, President of the United States of America, January 20, 2009. Taken from live TV in my office. I have previously quoted his speech from that day on this blog.