Clouding over and trying to snow in the Flathead Valley -- there was enough to make the morning commute dangerous yesterday, but it all melted by noon. A well-meaning young man dumped his bicycle right behind me on the slippery road yesterday in the early AM. Luckily he was uninjured and got right back up before anybody slid into him. I have new tires, but still felt unsteady making that same turn -- I know I fishtailed a little.

Sitemeter Sez: Visitors from Spanish Town, Jamaica; Bordeaux, France; Noisy-le-Grand on the Ile-de-France (Paris is big); Montreal, Quebec; Lurkers from Daily Kos; Duluth, Georgia; Vancouver, British Columbia; Frederick, Maryland; Emporia, Kansas; Albuquerque, New Mexico (see below); Copiap, Chile; Chesterland, Ohio; Palatine, Illinois and Morehead City, North Carolina.

New revisions 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!
NEW --Launching NOW! Outre Space Cinema -- Featuring: 1930's Rocketry, Spitfires of the Spaceways and Cellulose to Celluloid, Flash Gordon in 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's Autumn Salon has two more weeks to run. We will likely change Crown of the Continent a little, and continue Ace of Diamonds. The art run to Eastern Montana in December was revised again.
I'm finalizing my lecture this week on Black Music in the U.S.A. -- a half hour of basics, and an hour of FUNK!

Media Watch: Keith Jarrett playing Shostakovich piano pieces on Montana Public Radio -- absolutely brilliant! I've always liked Jarrett's compositions more than the old Soviet weasel's anyway, and he found the beauty within them, buried under the Stalinist safeness. I enjoy Prokofiev very much, so I have nothing against Soviet artists per se. If you wanted to get the late Frank Zappa's goat, all you had to do was compare him to Shostakovich.
Out of the blue, I got an email asking for permission to reprint my memory-piece about The Beatles White Album from Paul Ingles in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I said yes, and listened to the third installment of his White Album Listening Party last night. The program featured a very entertaining digital mashup combining BOTH versions of Revolution.
Later, I took a look at the Listening Party Web Site, and my words were transcribed there that very evening -- Paul made a slight revision though, and arranged my words to fit the order of the album. It was a good change and made my post more clear. I'm going to stick with my old version on this blog, though, because that was the way the DJ played the record in 1968.
The voice of the 19-year-old me, sitting in that parked car outside of the U of U football stadium, comes through over the gulf of time, possibly because I wrote it so fast. I was looking for fun and funny from The Beatles, plus musical innovations, and the White Album delivered those things to me in a double helping.
I see the voice of contemporary me creeping-in with words of anxiety about John Lennon. At that time I thought he was just sardonic -- I had no real awareness about the serious challenges he faced in his life then.
Personally, my favorite musician at the time was the mercurial Michael Bloomfield, and my favorite groups were Quicksilver Messenger Service and the Grateful Dead -- guitar gods from the San Francisco Bay. Eric Clapton/Cream and Jimi Hendryx were just starting to claim the popularity they had earned over the previous year and a half, and Jeff Beck was asserting himself at last. Sly & the Family Stone created an wave of Funk that encircled the whole world, which the Temptations in turn sailed to the top of the charts. This was a period where neither the Rolling Stones or Beatles really led the way in Rock, but my young self didn't quite notice, or care, when there was so much music from other sources to hear and enjoy.

This basic composition of album art, advertising the University of Utah's campus-only radio station, inexplicably stayed up on the main kiosk in the Student Union Building for almost two years between 1968 and 1970, on the same floor with the bowling alley, barber shop, pool hall/card room (ahem), art gallery, movie theater, and the fast-food "Huddle" -- an epicenter of alternative culture and politics that rivaled the Cosmic Aeroplane. We planned more than a few anti-war rallies and demonstrations in sight of these same pictures, set up some outrageous art shows, and rediscovered Bride of Frankenstein and Busby Berkeley for ourselves. The elegantly nude cover of Paul Mauriat's Love Is Blue album imitated Wanda Embry's famous body-paint poster. These four portraits of the Beatles were all that came with the White Album, besides minimal liner notes.

Pearl Harbor Day is followed by the anniversary of John Lennon's murder nowadays. World War Two was the defining event of my parent's generation. Viet Nam and Korea were important, but not near as definitive, since they shared the world with their children then. I'd like to think that Music was a significant component of my own generation's definition. It may sound shallow -- except that it was a major cultural indicator in the long fight for social and racial justice which actually made gains overall, despite bitter reversals. Lennon's assassination was just a sick, stupid crime when compared to the impact of King's and the Kennedys' murders, but it diminished us nevertheless.
I have noted before how Pearl Harbor was the opening salvo in a concerted attack by the Japanese Empire on the Ameican/European imperial powers in Asia that was hideously successful on land and sea until it stumbled in the inconclusive Battle of the Coral Sea, retiring in good order to fight again. Without the unlooked-for luck the U.S. experienced at Midway, where four irreplaceable Japanese carriers went to the bottom, I dread the thought of what might have happened.
After their defeat, Japan became a major economic partner of the U.S -- I grew up in a world where a certain percentage of my local population went to Japan due to the draft, and came back with SOMETHING. Our popular culture also benefitted from inexpensive electronics (see my musings on music above), and even silly-assed monster movies, not to mention the cinematic masterpieces of Kurosawa. I chose to study Japanese Art History as a minor when I went to college, and got a great education in the process. I collected and advocated Manga from the late 60's onward, and I'm happy they are an international success. I've even driven Toyotas for twenty-five years, after driving Volkwagens for twenty years before that -- which leads to:
World War Two was a catastrophe that also involved Nazi Germany, and alliances between the United States, China, and the Soviet Union which shifted, changed, and set the political shape of the planet for the rest of the 20th Century. Pearl Harbor meant that the US also went to war across the Atlantic too. Without the huge forces of the U.S.S.R. brought to bear against the Third Reich, I also dread what might have happened there -- my father's friends and peers had their hands full fighting their own portions of Hitler's Wehrmacht. When he served in Germany after V-E Day, he was in the Military Police, who maintained order, and tried to keep the population from starving to death.
I became an internationalist of a sort, despite growing up in the white-bread suburbs of Post War America -- I had company in the generation I grew up with, who inherited contacts abroad due to World War Two.

Click to enlarge
Artist Kano Tanyu decorated the interior of the ultra-fancy Nikko Toshu-Gu with sober near-monochrome ink paintings to honor the memory of Shogun Tokugawa Ieasu, who founded a dynasty that ruled Japan in relative peace for 250 years. In return, the country sacrificed most foriegn trade, and contact with the world beyond its borders, though. Emperor Meiji moved the imperial capitol to Tokyo (Edo) from Kyoto in 1860 when the Tokugawa samurai gave up their hereditary power in order to form a modern government. By the end of World War One, Japan owned an international empire which was destroyed by their own aggression during World War Two.

Sitemeter Sez: Visitors from Vancouver, British Columbia; Langley, British Columbia; Unna, Germany; Bellingham, Washington; Minneapolis, Minnesota; Aston, Pennsylvania; Plainfield, New Jersey; Brentwood, New York; El Paso, Texas; Aston, Pennsylvania; Sorrento, Maine; Fayetteville, Arkansas; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (looking for Wanda Day); Santa Cruz, California (looking for Crimson Rose); Cape Neddick, Maine; Lancaster, Pennsylvania; Cedar Falls, Iowa; Gteborg, Sweden, and Columbia, Missouri.

New revisions 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!
NEW --Launching NOW! Outre Space Cinema -- Featuring: 1930's Rocketry, Spitfires of the Spaceways and Cellulose to Celluloid, Flash Gordon in 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's Autumn Salon, with 116 pieces on display. We also have Crown of the Continent and Ace of Diamonds gracing our walls. Looks like the art run to Eastern Montana in December was revised again.
I'm still gathering CDs together for my lecture next week on Black Music in the U.S.A. -- a half hour of basics, and an hour of FUNK!, mixing all the elements together.

Media Watch: Tristan und Isolde by Richard Wagner live from The Met on Montana Public Radio for about five hours. Wagner's long, lush melodies are always pleasant, but this story of fatal adulterous love is as over-the-top as anything can be from the so-called Age of Chivalry -- some versions even include King Arthur, or his horny old man Uther Pendragon. Who knows? The long-lost seed of the original tale might be at the root for ALL the others. Supposedly, Wagner wrote much of this music for his mistress. Oh well, the lovers are still doomed and hopeless because of those dastarly magical potions -- Brunhilde lost Siegfried to one of those brews in another Wagner opera, and she made EVERYBODY pay. I remember seeing a Jean Cocteau movie retelling Tristan & Isolde too. Footsbarn Theatre toured Cornwall itself with their own version before I worked with them. It may seem declasse, but I always think of the Doo-Wop classic Love Potion Number Nine when this tale comes up.

Happy Birthday, Sagittarius!

Click to enlarge
A tribute of my own to Japanese Art and the Kano style -- digital ink with selected color, featuring my Sagittarian friend Ruth on one of our many walks in the western woods.

Being sick is harder at work, when you have to function. I managed, but it sure wasn't fun. I cheered up considerably when I heard from my friend Clara McBride in Paris -- she works with an improvisational group called The Improfessionals, among her many projects. She's also been making films.

Sitemeter Sez: Visitors from Abingdon, Maryland; Preston, UK; Boulder, Colorado; Clifton, New Jersey; Brooklyn, New York; Ottawa, Ontario; Riihimki, Southern Finland; Stockport, UK; Sacramento, California; Zanesville, Ohio; Paris, Ile-de-France (That you, Clara?); Budapest, Hungary; Reno, Nevada; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Chatham, UK, and Baltimore, Maryland.

New revisions 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!
NEW --Launching NOW! Outre Space Cinema -- Featuring: 1930's Rocketry, Spitfires of the Spaceways and Cellulose to Celluloid, Flash Gordon in 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's Autumn Salon, with 116 pieces on display. We also have Crown of the Continent and Ace of Diamonds gracing our walls. Looks like the art run to Eastern Montana in December was revised again.
I'm gathering some CDs together for my lecture next week on Black Music in the U.S.A.
It's Art Walk tonight, but I'm not risking my recovery by going anywhere, or spreading this damn cold.

Media Watch: Montana Public Radio was celebrating the life and music of John Lennon tonight. He was my favorite Beatle in general, and my favorite solo artist from the group -- yes, he could be self-indulgent, like the rest of them, but his high points acheived great heights indeed.

Iceland's Peace Tower commemorates John Lennon with light,as it holds Wagner's Waulkuries at bay in the darkness. Thank you, Yoko!

Ch-ch-changes: The great 1950's model Bettie Page has suffered a heart attack, and her odds of making it aren't very good at her age. There are many reasons to buy her products at www.bettiepage.com NOW, especially helping her out when she needs it.

First-rate model Bettie Page did all her great work for an industry that literally flited with illegality. Although she worked for legitimate publishers and photographers, some of her employment resulted in a congressional supoeana, and official destructon of many of her films and pictures. It turns out that most everything survived one way or another, and if you are THAT obsessed, you can get your own copy of even the most distasteful products which featured this talented lady. In her later years, when she acknowledged her career, she only signed the things she did that had merit, though.

Speaking of the 50's, Forrest J. Ackerman passed away recently at 92. He built bridges between Science Fiction/Fantasy publishers, movie makers, writers, illustrators, and their fans, especially by editing the magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland. I still have copies of his less-successful venture Spacemen, with lots of Buster Crabbe photos. Less well-known was his involvement in the first (abortive) attempt to make an animated film out of Lord of the Rings -- he's mentioned by name in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien. His greatest contribution to modern society was probably the early patronage of young, struggling Ray Bradbury. His editorial tastes often tended towards the shallow and vulgar, but fans like me had a lot of fun because of his efforts to make a buck off his beloved Sci-Fi field. The publishers of Famous Monsters later did magazine-sized comic strip anthologies by first-rate artists, like Creepy, Eerie, Vampirella, and even reprinted The Spirit by Will Eisner.

I have this very magazine, and several of its brothers. The romance of space travel and its hard cold practicality were always an awkward fit -- Flash Gordon was featured in several issues, but not THIS one. Ask me if I care (I don't) -- Jean Rogers as hypnotized Dale Arden, Larry "Buster Crabbe as Larry "Flash" Gordon, and Priscilla Lawson as the overly passionate Princess Aura.

Still inside, still sick -- no snow outside yet. I think I'll go to work in the morning.

Sitemeter Sez: Visitors from Randolph, New Jersey; Montreal, Quebec; Dothan, Alabama; Indaiatuba, Brazil; Newark, New Jersey; Stary Jicin, Czech Republic; New Hyde Park, New York; Oakland, California; Cleveland, Ohio; Zagreb, Croatia; Paris, France; Ankara, Turkey; Saravan, Iran; Besanon, France; Christchurch, New Zealand; Prague, Czech Republic; Goldsboro, North Carolina and Toronto, Ontario.

New revisions 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!
NEW --Launching NOW! Outre Space Cinema -- Featuring: 1930's Rocketry, Spitfires of the Spaceways and Cellulose to Celluloid, Flash Gordon in 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's Autumn Salon, with 116 pieces on display. We also have Crown of the Continent and Ace of Diamonds gracing our walls. Looks like the art run to Eastern Montana in December is being revised again.
I'm gathering some CDs together for a lecture next week on Black Music in the U.S.A. -- it is too big a subject on its own, but I'm going to concentrate on FUNK, which touches all genres of the field -- and even transcends it.

Activity Watch: Thank goodness for Public Radio -- lots of variety. That "White Album" listening party was doled out in hour-long bites, and I had my say last week on this blog. I haven't even had the energy for NFL Football this weekend. That's kind of like admitting to being too drunk to fish. I matted a couple of artworks, and may do some more. My bills are all current, but today's dishes aren't done. Talking on the phone was fun, but my throat hurts.
I was out and about a little yesterday, getting some necessary chores done, and saw a relatively new melodrama about humble Mary and Joseph being advertised around town. The faces of the two young players were on the poster, and they had VERY humble looks indeed, at least as they were printed.
Since medieval times images of the New Testament Holy Family have been the reflections of local populations, but I rarely see anyone out and about as unfavored by fate as those kids in those pictures (shudder). I'll blame the photographer/graphic artist. Except for rightwing talk-show hosts, there's nobody THAT ugly around here, especially among our teenagers.
I'm very stoked about Katie's visit to the USA, but she and Justin are a thousand miles away, and I'd still be sick if I was in San Diego -- too many others would catch this cold.

Let's Visit Southern California! Click to enlarge the image

From Suite One by Johann Sebastian Bach
Justin Morrison used this video of Katie's duet with Alex Waterman (cello) to promote her workshop this Thursday. It was shot at the Holland Dance Festival in 2004.
Watch the whole thing HERE

I've stayed in over the holiday weekend trying to recover from this $#@! cold, but I've enjoyed some fine phone conversations with friends and some dynamite emails!

Sitemeter Sez: Visitors from Montreal, Quebec; Glencoe, Ontario; Burlington, Vermont; Houston, Texas; Anchorage, Alaska; Arvada, Colorado; Jamaica, New York; Dartford, Kent; Franchere, Alberta; Liverpool, New York; Melbourne, Australia; Virginia Beach, Virginia; Grand Meadow, Minnesota; Calgary, Alberta (sniff -- still sick); Kamloops, British Columbia; Sacramento, California; Dublin, Ireland (That you, Eavan?); Tampa, Florida; Guadalajara, Mexico; Spanaway, Washington; Lake Bluff, Illinois; San Diego, California (Yo Justin! Yo Katie!); Moscow, Russia; Villahermosa, Mexico; San Antonio, Texas; Portland, Oregon; Meridian, Idaho; Brooklyn, New York; Tacoma, Washington; Columbus, Ohio; City of London, UK, and Kerhonkson, New York.

New revisions 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!
NEW --Launching NOW! Outre Space Cinema -- Featuring: 1930's Rocketry, Spitfires of the Spaceways and Cellulose to Celluloid, Flash Gordon in 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's Autumn Salon, with 116 pieces on display. We also have Crown of the Continent and Ace of Diamonds gracing our walls. Looks like the art run to Eastern Montana in December is being revised again.

Media Watch: The Damnation of Faust by Hector Berlioz (1846) -- not as dark and dynamic as Gunod's Faust, but there was some absolutely beautiful choral work by NYC's Metropolitan Opera behind Marguerite (Susan Graham), Faust (Marcello Giordani), and Méphistophélès (John Relyea). The male singers dominated the work, but hapless Marguerite finally went to Heaven after spending the whole Opera stuck between that horny old philosopher and the Devil himself.

Many Meetings: Thanks to the Internet and telephone, I had a long pleasant conversation with my friend Katie Duck -- Modern Dance's equivalent of Keith Jarrett. She will be in the USA for another week, so we'll speak again. I was so excited, I called other friends from my theatrical days. I had a nice long chat with Nina Cheney in Wisconsin, and Katie's right-hand dancer Patsy Droubay in Salt Lake (Bountiful, actually but only Utahns know where that place is located.) Fellow Sagittarius Ruth Arrington called me today to brighten up a gray day of recovery, and I sent out an indirect message to help find my friend Pooja in Bombay. We also talked about Mumbai on another web site, since Leopold's defiantly opened after the terrorist assault was finally defeated. All I could contribute was my enthusiasm about Bollywood movies, but that subject REALLY brightened the conversation, as a way of bringing a tiny bit of Mumbai into people's homes.

Move Over Velveteen Elvis Impersonators -- There's NEW Kitsch In Town!

Scary enough for you?
My friend Nina Cheney (inset) played Sarah Palin for Halloween this year -- she's trained in classical mask techniques, and all she needed was a shiny jacket, a quick hair job, glasses, and a certain uh -- attitude to impersonate Alaska's shamelessly self-absorbed governor. (Lower Left) In the Upper Left, a brave Alaskan demonstrates against the 2008 Republican ticket in Anchorage.

I'm 59 years old, but I didn't think I'd live to see this day, because I caught a head cold the other night which damn near killed me. I'm NOT having turkey dinner, I'm NOT going to Calgary this weekend to see Bollywood movies, all because I'm SICK and contagious.

Sitemeter Sez: Visitors from Sarnia, Ontario; Toronto, Ontario; Huntington Beach, California; Gijn, Spain; Quebec City, Canada; Redmond, Washington (used to work there); NYC, New York; Pleasantville, New York; Matane, Quebec; South Orange, New Jersey; Kingston, Ontario; Moscow, Russia; Esfahan, Iran; Sacramento, California; Cleveland, Ohio; Omaha, Nebraska; Montreal, Quebec; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Courtenay, British Columbia; Springfield, Missouri; El Paso, Texas; Hooksett, New Hampshire; Calgary, Alberta (I should be on my way there, but I'm NOT); Los Angeles, California and Seal Beach, California.

New revisions 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!
NEW --Launching NOW! Outre Space Cinema -- Featuring: 1930's Rocketry, Spitfires of the Spaceways and Cellulose to Celluloid, Flash Gordon in 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's Autumn Salon, with 116 pieces on display. We also have Crown of the Continent and Ace of Diamonds gracing our walls. Looks like the art run to Eastern Montana in December is being revised again.

Media Watch: Trash A Go Go gave their cheezy mirror-ball trophy to Brooke Burke and Derek Hough -- EXCELLENT! They were the best all the way this season, in my humble opinion. I was surprised when Lance Bass took third, behind Warren Sapp. If it was due to the fan-factor, then NFL players have it over Pop Stars. Derek's sibling Julianne Hough announced that she was skipping the next season, which considering her recent hospitalization, makes sense. If she wants to move her Country Music career beyond "novelty act," she has a lot of work to do, plus the breaks still need to fall her way. Nashville is as cruel and cold as Hollywood in every way.

My parting words today are directed towards Mumbai (Bombay), India -- a centuries-old beacon of civilization and culture. The posh center of this city of 18 million people was attacked by squads of gunmen over the last two days, and over a hundred people have died in this useless act of terrorism. The identities of the perpetrators are still unknown, as is the reason for the slaughter. All I can say is that my prayers are with every good-hearted person there -- especially my friend Puja who works at the Indian Embassy.

Taking your mind off of trouble ...

A digitally-altered image of traditionally-trained dancer and Bollywood movie star Madhuri Dixit, representing the lightness and beauty of the made-in-Bombay movies I enjoy watching.