Your Sound Choice
Musical ramblings from the manager
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 […]
There was a time when one could not escape Bob Welch on FM radio. Hardly an hour would pass without his late 1970s hits Ebony Eyes or Sentimental Lady flowing from the speakers. Welch, who passed away in June of 2012 at the age of 66, was a much more complicated human being than […]
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, […]
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 […]
Our good friend Gary Tanin at Daystorm Music in Milwaukee recently sent along Jim Eannelli’s first solo album Just Deserts which was released in both digital and physical formats on September 27, 2024. Yours truly was visiting Eugene, Oregon in late August to catch John Fogerty’s 56th Anniversary Celebration concert when the Just Deserts […]