In December of 2016, I almost subscribed to Classic Rock Magazine.  I found myself buying a copy whenever they weren’t sold out at the bookstore, so it seemed the logical thing to do would be to save a few bucks and subscribe.  I cued up the TeamRock website and was met with an announcement […]

      Perhaps you have seen the cover of the album Goodnight Vienna.  It pays homage to the 1951 Sci-fi classic movie The Day the Earth Stood Still.  There in the doorway of the prototypical 1950’s flying saucer stands the nine-foot tall robot Gort.  Next to him, with helmet tucked under the arm of his silvery […]

    Warning:  If you are able to identify the person named in the title above,  you are about to confront an age old conundrum. (or perhaps it is an old age conundrum).  It goes like this: If you make a cultural reference and no one else in the room has any idea what you are talking […]

      We always equated the beginning of the next school year with the start up of marching band in August.  The summer after my junior year, we had made plans to march in the Marquette Fourth of July parade as a prelude to taking a band trip to march in two parades at the Traverse […]

      In the interest of brevity, I decided to not use “To solo or not to solo” as the title of this FTV.  Reading Phil Collins’ memoir “Not Dead Yet” got me thinking about all the drummers I have had the pleasure to hear over the years.  Listening to various types of music means one […]

      Rumor has it that Robert Downey, Jr. used Elon Musk as his template for the billionaire industrialist playboy Tony Stark (see Stan Lee’s Marvel Universe under ‘A’ for Avengers and ‘I’ for Iron Man).  Certainly there are differences:  Stark has Pepper Potts, amazing holographic computer technology, no children, and, of course, there is that […]

 “About four hours before a launch, the Falcon 9 starts getting filled with an immense amount of liquid oxygen and rocket-grade kerosene.  Some of the liquid oxygen vents out of the rocket as it awaits launch and is kept so cold that it boils off on contact with the metal and air, forming white plumes […]

      David Fitzpatrick’s new album Parachutes in Hurricanes is the latest disk to make its way north from Milwaukee via Gary Tanin’s Daystorm Records.  I was only able to give it a quick run through when Gary first sent it our way to preview and that is a poor way to listen to a new […]

    In Part 1, we examined several ways that opening the Great Lakes to an ecological invasion of species began with the earliest attempts to ease transport of goods from the Atlantic Coast inland.  Using Dan Egan’s book The Death and Life of the Great Lakes as a guide, we looked at how opening the door, […]

       Prior to 1900, the Chicago River flowed into Lake Michigan carrying with it a feted cargo of sewage from the growing metropolis of the same name.  Lake Michigan also served as the Chicago’s source of drinking water. The movers and shakers in the city decided the best way to solve their sewage/fresh water problem […]