NEW Web Site: Theater X-Net
Featuring: Ida Rubinstein Belle Epoch Russian/Parisian beauty.
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Theater, Art, Flash Gordon, Funky Music and MORE!
Weather: There was a lot of cold mist and fog banks underneath a blue sky while the temperature stayed around 15 degrees (F) during the day and even the night.
Charity Alert: Click on The Hunger Site to feel warmer.
In The Community: The Hockaday Museum is going to do some student outreach days this winter -- especially reaching out to Flathead Valley Community College students. There is a Flathead Valley Educators exhibit starting next month, so we'll build on that.
Speaking of which, it's ironically funny hearing lame excuses about deadlines from adult teachers who have to hear those same lame excuses from adolescent students.
That Christmas party for the college employees was videotaped (not by me). I will be burning over a dozen DVDs of it before I'm done. We are even streaming the dam' silly thing over our (secure) network. While there are warm feelings going on, we're going to recruit for NEXT year's party.
Media Watch: Ice skating on TV -- ice skating on the lake too, but not as masterful.
We watched The Giant Gila Monster, and Bela Lugosi Meets A Brooklyn Gorilla last night. If you like 50's cars, the former is right up your alley, uh -- drag-strip. The latter is a shameful waste of film promoting an inept pair of Martin & Lewis imitators.
This photo belongs to the aforementioned site,
and is used simply to motivate the viewer to visit there.
(Cross-posted on DailyKos.com) I shouldn't have let the following get me down so badly, but it did -- the local newspaper published a letter to the editor today, purportedly written by an eleven year old. The kid was whining about Christmas being threatened, and pleading to not have his or her Christmas taken away. There's no way of knowing if it was from a real child with those concerns, but I am absolutely certain the letter resulted from the phony "War on Christmas" hysteria promulgated by the American Taliban -- the only campaign about our traditional Holiday Season that even exists is by them. There is no other.
(I do not choose to say the names of Fox's biggest blowhard, or the (Im)Moral Majority's former spokesmouth.)
What saddens me is "Happy Holidays," or Merry Christmas" are now given and taken as offensive statements for the first time in my life. There is a lesson here in the power of propaganda, but it is ugly. This unnecessary rage and unprovoked defensiveness during a time of year when people want to be happy is part of a deliberate public campaign. I can't understand why someone would want to inflict these bad feeling on their neighbors, but they have.
It is as if they've chosen to pour kerosene in the public water supply, so that everybody has to share a vile taste in their mouths and suffer digestive problems -- for no other reason than they wanted to exercise their power to make them feel that way. The answer would be to take that kind of power from such mean-spirited vandals with legal action.
As far as public media goes, such stomach-turning manipulators should lose their credibility immediately, but the public happens to believe in free speech first, and are slow to take sanctions against the worst abusers of this privilege. I would prefer to hear them laughed off of TV and radio, but nobody's laughing.
I now propose everyone say "Happy Holidays," "Merry Christmas," Happy New Year," and every good thing we can think of to every stranger and acquaintance we meet -- I hope every single holiday YOU have will be happy!
