It looks a little more like Autumn, but our leaves were blighted by the near-zero cold, and may not change color that much before falling. The thumbnail-thin waning moon was sure beautiful yesterday morning!

Sitemeter Sez: Burlington, New Jersey; Mountain View, California (showing up a lot); South Pasadena, California; Columbus, Ohio, and Sherman, Texas.

The Mime Troupe Saga continues: 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: News and Events at Flathead Community College New website for the Hockaday Museum. (I got my Autumn Salon artwork in on time, along with colleauge Susie Arthur Guthrie.)
The Flathead County Library's Big Read this year, focuing on Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird, featured James W. Loewen, an author who witnessed the corrosion caused by institutional racism in Mississippi. He identified periods of time where relations between the races in Amerika were better and worse -- especially "The Nadir," between 1890 and 1940, where discrimination and outright murder were part of our country's legal code. "Jim," as he prefers to be called also touched on the books which made him famous -- like Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, but he had to catch the Amtrack that night, and his presentation was necessarily shortened.
Jim was introduced to the crowd by Bruce Guthrie (Susie's husband), who had hosted Loewen in his own History class that afternoon at Flathead High School. Good going, Bruce!

Then and Now -- Disappearing Glaciers of Glacier National Park.

Tears and Laughter about our broken health care system HERE

High & Low Media: The San Francisco Opera is doing Verdi's tuneful tear-jerker La Traviata (1854) as I write. I've mentioned it before, but this story of a "professional" woman loving a young "innocent" has haunted the performing arts for a very long time. This production has the action set during the so-called Roaring 20's, but I've neither heard any Jazz, nor has anyone danced the Charleston yet. (Not expecting these things either.)

Party at the Marquis' mansion! From the San Francisco Opera's website -- those 'flappers' may look like they're wearing armor, but this time period is excellent as a setting for this sad tale. History shows that too many mistresses of rich and famous plutocrats died of preventable diseases -- the right scholar could investigate their cases.
Like last week's Tosca, the lead female role was brilliantly interpreted by Sarah Bernhardt on the "legitimate stage" -- in the drama we know as Camille. I daresay there's an echo of this riff in the publicity-driven affairs between pornstars and other showbiz figures today. Speaking of which, the mixed martial artist is OFF Trash A Go Go I, leaving at least two talentless schlubs ready to go next. There are too many contestants this season IMHO.

A Dam' Meteor over A'Dam!

A meteor burned up over the Netherlands last night, and some pictures were taken of the event. Astronomers call this kind of phenomenon a bollide.

WOW! That was a nasty cold snap -- broke an outdoor water pipe at my house (fixed now), and generally messed up Autumn. I had to plug in my car for a few nights too.

Sitemeter Sez: My unknown pal from Louth, Ireland; Trenton, New Jersey; Elmendorf AFB, Alaska, Anchorage, Alaska; Silver Spring, Maryland; Columbia Falls, Montana; Somewhere in the UK, and Mountain View, California.

The Mime Troupe Saga continues: 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: News and Events at Flathead Community College New website for the Hockaday Museum. (I'm working on my Autumn Salon artwork, with Katie Duck as my muse.)
Prom Night In Mississipi on the big screens tonight, kicking off the Flathead County Library's Big Read this year, focused on Harper Lee's great novel To Kill A Mockingbird, and the society which exists around its themes , even today.

Then and Now -- Disappearing Glaciers of Glacier National Park.

Tears and Laughter about our broken health care system HERE

Congratulations: President Barack Hussein Obama for his Nobel Peace Prize. ('Nuff Said!)

Media Watch: Trash A Go Go is safe to watch now, without GOP Bugmen invading my TV. However, there are some sorry male schlubs still prancing around on that stage! Singer Mya is by far the most graceful of the celebrities, and couple of other women are showing promise. They had a few Charleston dances, which permitted comic actor Melissa Joan Hart and professional hambone Donny Osmond to slide through the week. I'm not sure if I want to subject myself to a lot of yelling and crying on Trash A Go Go II while they winnow the final 20 dancers out of a hundred or more. Speaking of which, I hope Shakira's performances are better tonight than the last time I saw her on network TV -- the music was lip-synched, the solo choreography was slow, and a bit more fetishistic than sexy, which didn't suit this international star's style at all.

Real Crappy Movies: Beast of Yucca Flats (1961) gives amateurism a bad name. Actor/Wrestler Tor Johnson was reportedly a real nice guy who just went to work. The same riff of an A-Bomb turning a scientist into a monster was used by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee about a year later when Marvel Comics first published The Incredible Hulk -- I'm not going to say that Marvel stole from such a low-grade pile of radioactive dung. I'm not even sure Beast was released to the public so it COULD be stolen.
Roger Corman's Last Woman On Earth is pretty bad too -- virtually unwatchable. It was shot in Puerto Rico back-to-back with two other productions: Battle of Blood Island, and Creature From The Haunted Sea. The later is crude, even for a Corman flick, but is funnier than most of his work.

Betsy Jones-Moreland, singing star of Creature From The Haunted Sea and unfortunate object of male attentions in Last Woman On Earth. She was also a co-star, along with Abby Dalton and others, of Corman's early hit Viking Women vs. the Sea Serpent. I'm glad to say she had a long career playing various roles on TV, far from the great schlock-meister's reach.