Your Sound Choice
Musical ramblings from the manager
One of the boldest decisions made in the Apollo Moon landing program was the decision to send the Apollo 8 spacecraft to the Moon in December of 1968. Apollo 8 was originally supposed to be a shakedown flight of the integrated Command Service Module (CSM) and the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM, later shortened to […]
The Turtles almost didn’t happen. Call it fate or kismet or whatever, but one of the top selling bands of the late 1960s were DOA and then they weren’t (more on this in a bit). When vocalist Mark Voman passed away in September of 2025, it prompted me to find a copy of his […]
As explained in last week’s FTV, the saber rattling over Greenland sent us back into our archives to 2018 when we shared the story of the last invasion of that landmass. The loud protests from Greenlanders, Denmark, and other European members of NATO indicate any attempt by the United States to purchase or annex […]
With all the kerfuffle about Greenland (the one associated with Denmark, not the one next to Mass City, Michigan), I decided to dig back in the FTV archives for a historical piece about an earlier tussle over this piece of North Atlantic real estate. People often mistake Greenland for the eighth continent because the […]
Let me set the record straight once and for all. Jethro Tull was a real person. He was an 18th Century agriculturist known for inventing the seed drill. Tull’s name was suggested to band leader Ian Anderson by their manager when they moved from the north of England to London. Gigs were hard to […]
Over the decades it has existed, January has been a hard month for NASA (followed closely by February). Sadly, the loss of the Apollo 1 crew during a training session on January 27, 1967 marked the first mission related fatalities for the United States manned space program. The Apollo 1 accident took place during what […]
I have an admission to make: I have always been and continue to be addicted to reading newspapers. It began innocently enough when I would grab the Marquette Mining Journal that the paperboy would put behind our screen door each day. The first and only order of business when this started was to flip to […]
The following artist’s names conjure up an instant mental image: Cher, Elvis, Prince, Madonna, Rihanna, Shakira, Adele, Beyonce, Bono, Sting, Eminem, Sade, Kesha, Flea, and Slash (to name a few more modern examples). Do you remember the black leather clad Elvis or the spangly jumpsuited Elvis? Do you see Cher standing next to Sonny Bono […]
In each issue of a quarterly publication called The Planetary Report, the Planetary Society includes a trivia question. Some are more challenging than others and everybody that emails in the correct answer has their name tossed into a random drawing for a free tee shirt. Having sent in my entry religiously over the years, […]
If you are wondering about my numbering system for the band Guns N’ Roses, let me count them off. Version 1.0, the original line up that found fame with their debut album, included Axl Rose, Slash, Duff McKagen, Izzy Stradlin, and Steven Adler on vocals, guitar, bass, second guitar and drums, respectively. They came […]