Election Day! Vote for SANITY, please. There was a Mama Deer and two Fawns off the back deck this morning while we were dragging our own tails off to the polls. It was dark, wet, and warmish under the thick clouds. We had to wait in line about a half hour to vote -- two years ago it was well over 2 hours.

Footbarn's Celebration of Theatre: Theater X-Net

Starring: Ida Rubinstein Belle Epoch Russian/Parisian beauty.
Ida's Places in Paris, from my jet-lagged first day by the Seine.
Read more about Ida in Sisters of Salome by Toni Bentley
Click on Exceptionally Yours to find Footsbarn Theatre

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 Winter sneaks up on us! Click on The Hunger Site every day.

In The Community: I am thinking of showing up at a live-blogging event tonight at the Knead Cafe. I can contribute a photo of the scene while Doug does all the keyboarding. I'm also going out to see my friends the Wheelers tomorrow. I did Scott's Wheeler for Legislature Website, and so I'm hoping he'll win, and win big.

Media Watch: Simon Winchester's The Day The World Exploded, about the Krakatoa eruption of 1883. There's a lot of stories sketched out in this book -- The Dutch East India Company; Co-founding evolutionist Alfred Wallace and his Asia/Australia biological boundary line; Meteorologist Alfred Wegener, the long pursuit of proof for Continental Drift, plus his posthumous vindication; Even the subject of atmospheric disturbances adding to the multiple miseries of the Dark Ages, because of a possible (but unproven) Krakatoa eruption in the 6th Century A.D. (I mentioned a PBS show about that theory on this blog recently -- it addressed the thesis of the book Catastrophe by David Keys -- Ken Wohletz's analysis HERE)
One observation impresses me -- the collision of relativly light continental masses and heavy oceanic tectonic plates under the Spice Islands creates particularly explosive and violent volcanos.

OK -- I vacationed on a volcano in 1976. The island of Stromboli, which is always erupting from the northwest side, or the crater. It rises over 3000 feet out of the Mediterranean Sea. There are two white-washed villlages standing there on either side of the black pumice cone. From the top, there are other volcanos as far as you can see.



VOLCANIC PASSION! Ingrid Bergman was the star of Roberto Rosselinni's half-baked movie Stromboli (1950). Whatever artistic statement they wanted to make was drowned out by the public furor over their private lives. A much finer result of their collaboration was talented daughter Isabella. All kidding aside, Stromboli had been seriously depopulated by a disasterous eruption in 1939. Things were still pretty bad when they made this film in 1949. I'm not sure where Rossellini got his destruction footage, but it could have been from a decade earlier. When I was there in the mid-70's, almost a fourth of the houses on the Northeast side were still damaged by hot ash from the skies. It wasn't difficult at all to cross the island from one village to another -- Bergman must have been slowed down by the camera crew in this shot. (Day-um! There I go, kidding again.)