Your Sound Choice
Musical ramblings from the manager
There are plenty of rock stars out there who climb to the top of their profession by being outrageous, bombastic, colorful, and sometimes, just plain weird. Sure, there has to be enough talent on board for one to write and/or perform music, but it seems like some are trying a little too hard to […]
Listening to the opening lines of The Beatles Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, it struck me that it has been fifty years since I began my semester long stint student teaching. Okay, so it was ‘fifty years ago this month’ and not ‘today’, but it still got me thinking about what I took away […]
The Van Halen brothers were really into George Orwell when they were working on the album listed in the title above. Don’t recognize it? They originally wanted to call it Animal Farm but settled for 1984 instead. It was a product of Ed’s new home studio he dubbed 5150. According to Ed’s brother (and […]
Both Chinese and Greek philosophers are given credit for the origins of the old saying, “The wheels of justice turn slowly.” Sun Tzu’s version is often quoted (“Wheels of justice grind slow but grind fine”). Greek biographer Plutarch’s claim is based on his paraphrasing an ancient Greek proverb when he said, “Thus, I do […]
We left Part 1 of this story just as the surface rescue teams finally penetrated the lowest levels of the San Jose Mine. At this point, they had no idea if there were any survivors from the cataclysmic collapse that occurred on August 5, 2010. It was day seventeen before the drill rig labeled […]
The first time I was underground in a working mine was in the spring of 1974. Eleven of us crammed into a thirteen passenger van and left Marquette to take a geological field trip around Lake Superior. Organized by Dr. John Hughes, our first day of travel took us all the way to Sudbury, Ontario. […]
In the summer of 1999, author Stephen Ambrose was having dinner with his old friend George McGovern. Having been an acquaintance of the former 1972 presidential candidate, he knew of his previous service in the Army Air Force during World War II. Over dinner, McGovern mentioned he had recently sat for several interviews with […]
In Part 1 of Mission Control, we introduced Christopher Columbus Kraft, the man who guided the birth of ‘Mission Control’ for the United States space program. Kraft and his group invented the position that became commonly known as ‘Flight’. This call sign has been used for the director who rules over NASA’s ground control […]
AstroCal – December 2024 Although the shortest daylight of this year falls on the Winter Solstice – December 21, it will only take a few weeks before the daylight hours begin to slowly lengthen again. I won’t go into my usual complaint about ‘how nice it would be to stay on Daylight Saving Time […]
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 […]