Your Sound Choice
Musical ramblings from the manager
A few weeks ago, Neil Rumney of Rhinelander, Wisconsin sent an email to the Ontonagon Area Schools asking if the email address he had found for me (Ken Raisanen) was still active. Soon after I replied to this message, a second email arrived from his daughter Hannah, a forestry student at UW-Stevens Point. The photo […]
I am no world traveler, but ever since I graduated from high school, I have managed to visit both coasts of our fair country and a handful of places in between. My first trip by air was a modest one. My brother Ron had just finished his first year of teaching in downstate Chesaning […]
When I taught my students about the evolution of NASA’s Manned Flight Program, I would mention a project called Dyna-Soar. I had read snippets about it but never knew many of the details until I read General Chuck Yeager’s biography (Yeager – 1985 – C.Yeager & L.Janos – Bantam Books). Yeager’s life and career […]
Though they span decades and many genres, there is a connecting thread between the following list of guitar players: Jeff Beck, Lindsey Buckingham, Ritchie Kotzen, Robbie Krieger, Albert Collins, Albert King, Bonnie Raitt, Derek Trucks, Wes Montgomery, Joe Pass, and, as noted in the title above, Mark Knopfler. It isn’t a brand of guitar, the […]
After frequently using and citing references from Guitar World magazine, I was asked why a drummer would subscribe to a guitar magazine. It was a valid question and my tongue in cheek answer was, “Well, with my guitar playing skills, it isn’t for the articles about shredding solos or pentatonic scales.” The truth is, […]
In Part One, we looked at the tale of the May 18, 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens up to and shortly after this cataclysmic event. The Monday after the Sunday fireworks, fellow Geography Department graduate student Mike Farrell and I started looking up information about a mountain we had never heard of. I […]
Do you need to be a little bit crazy to be a volcanologist? I used to show a video to my Geography / Earth Science classes that featured a French couple named Katia and Maurice Krafft. As he talked about what it is like to work on an active volcano, Maurice described the chaotic environment […]
It has been a while since we did a quiz to shake up the old grey matter, and thanks to our friends at AARP magazine, we have another fun one to share. We tacked on a few questions with local appeal and (as we have done in the past), the answers begin near the […]
Over the first two weeks of September 2025, I took my third consecutive concert trip to the WOAS-FM West Coast Bureau in Eugene, Oregon. This trip was a little different because I didn’t get to actually see a live show. In 2023 and 2024, I got to see live performances at the Cuthbert Outdoor […]
We begin this month’s observations with a term that was unfamiliar to me. Maybe it has just slipped my mind as it only takes place every 18.6 years, but the event is known as ‘lunistice’ (also called a ‘lunar standstill’). Lunistice is kind of like a ‘solstice’ only it involves the Moon and not the […]