Hot -- much hotter than usual, even at night now. We put up a little improvised barricade on our back deck to discourage a Skunk who included our bird feeders on his/her nightly route.

DANCE at the Hole In The Wall: Theater X-Net

Starring: Ida Rubinstein Belle Epoch Russian/Parisian beauty.
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! Spitfires of the Spaceways
Watch Dale Arden rescue Flash Gordon for a change!

Charity Alert: Keep that resolution as Summer advances! Click on The Hunger Site every day.

In The Community: Arts In The Park is very pleasant under the trees -- our annual fundraising open-air art show brought in an extra fifty visitors to The Hockaday Museum of Art itself yesterday. Mellow music seems to be the order of Sunday morning at the park -- Steve Eckles played an hour of esquisite classical guitar, and the Celtic Music group Tra La Gael was playing under the gazebo just before I came over here to open the Hockaday for my four-hour Sunday shift. On Friday we had the Blue Onion blues band rocking the leaves off the trees in the late afternoon, and I think we have a country group turning up their amps after 3 PM today.
I am going back this afternoon to shoot a few more pictures and help tear down the event. This marks the beginning of my eighth year working for this small, but important, art museum.

Media Watch: Trying to read myself to sleep during hot nights sometimes means Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan Triumphant -- an early-30's potboiler featuring Joe Stalin (as himself) sending an assassin to Africa to kill our ape-man hero; a downed aristocratic English aviatrix; a near-naked blond girl from the mythical African bush who befriends her; Abyssinian slave traders (led by yet another Communist rabble-rouser from Italy); and a lost nation of white religious fanatics inhabiting a dead volcano somewhere in Africa's upper Rift Valley. The Americans include an likeable, if absent-minded, male geology professor; and a hit-man on the run from Chicago. Tarzan's native allies, the Waziri, save the day with modern high-power rifles.

Picture Break! Tarzan Triumphant cover and various Tarzan illustrations by the late Roy G. Krenkel, whose career was overshadowed by friend Frank Frazetta. (I also included the magazine where this story was first serialized circa 1931.)

Ace Books started an Edgar Rice Burroughs revival in the early 60's when some copyrights lapsed, and they put out unauthorized paperbacks with fabulous covers by R.G. Krenkel and the recently-unemployed Frank Frazetta. After the legal battles were over, Ballantine Books published authorized editions of the complete Tarzan and Mars books, while Ace got the rights for Pellucidar, Venus, and other works -- for awhile one out of every thirty paperbacks sold in the USA was by E.R.B.

I Read The News Today (Oh Boy): It's a damn shame that Burroughs' second-rate pulp fantasy from the Great Depression has so many parallels with villians who actually plague our real world today. The history of the Bush II Administration reads like a bad satire about a government of stooges, led by religious fanatics and shameless thieves whose stated objectives are to louse things up -- the Merde-ass Touch as someone on DailyKos once said.
I spoke at length with a beautiful Israeli lady at Arts In The Park who was selling jewelry made from ancient coins. Her husband and family are living under artillary fire, as are her neighbors -- by whom I mean Moslems, Druse, and Christians, all over the Levant, who are at war -- led by idiots who just want to see their faces on TV, and hear themselves "talking tough" as their people suffer and die -- the same kind of heartless criminals who are governing my country.