The 1995 movie adaptation of Jim Lovell’s book Lost Moon spawned a catch phrase that took on a life of its own. In Apollo 13, Tom Hanks (who portrayed Lovell) repeated the famous, “Houston, we have a problem” after the explosion on board their Moon bound spacecraft was first called in by his fellow […]
Dave Mason was feeling anything but ‘alright’ in December of 1968. He was summoned to ‘another band meeting of Traffic’, the band he had cofounded with Steve Winwood, Chris Wood, and Jim Capaldi. The meeting was held at the home of their manager Chris Blackwell who was also the head of their record label, […]
Having done a couple of quizzes about songs and lyrics, I will take a different tact on this outing about Saturday Night Live. AARP – The Magazine ran a ‘test your knowledge of five decades of Saturday Night Live’ feature recently. Using their quiz, I am going to do a Johnny Carson ‘Carnac the […]
November will be an interesting month to watch the planets dance across the sky, especially Jupiter and Venus. On November 4, Jupiter will rise in the east just before Venus sets in the west. Both will be bright (magnitude -2.8 and -3.9 respectively) so they won’t be hard to see even though they will […]
Although there is no prohibition on revisiting past topics in these FTV chronicles, every once in a while a story comes up that is too good to leave in the past. With the fiftieth anniversary of the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald only a year away, I felt compelled to revisit this historical event. In […]
I mourn the loss of brick and motar bookstores. Book World in downtown Houghton was my favorite because when we would stop by to browse, I always managed to find the newest issue of Classic Rock Magazine or Mojo to keep me in touch with the music scene. When the entire Book World franchise […]
Comets do not always behave as advertised. Sometimes they are not as spectacular as predicted and sometimes they perform beyond what is expected. I will let our friends at Sky Calendar cover what may happen on the cometary front this month: “There’s a chance that Comet C/2023 A3 may surge in brightness around October […]
Here are five names that are included in the above title: Rhea Seddon, Shannon Lucid, Kathy Sullivan, Anna Fisher, and Judy Resnik. If you have an idea who these women are, then you are probably a space junky like me. If none of these names rings a bell, then the sixth name will probably […]
Even if school wasn’t your favorite place to be growing up, I am going to lay odds that you have memories of at least one of your teachers. While attending school was always one of those things we were mandated to do before we were set free into ‘the real world’, there were always […]
Norman Greenbaum was watching TV one night and saw country music legend Porter Wagoner perform an old Gospel song. Norman thought to himself, “Hey, I could do that,” and thus inspired, he proceeded to write his one and only No. 1 hit song Spirit in the Sky. An urban legend went around that Greenbaum […]