On those occasions when my students would complain the work I had assigned was boring, I would play the ‘Helen Toivonen Card’. As an educational mentor, they didn’t come much better than Helen. If her students complained, she would agree with them and say, “You are right. This is soooo boring, why don’t you […]
Okay fans of The Doors, complete the lyric begun in the title: Weird scenes . . . inside the gold mine (which comes from The End, the final track of their eponymous debut album). I purposely made this a little too easy so it would serve as a red herring. With my apologies to Jim […]
If evening planetary gazing is your thing, March is going to be a big disappointment to you. There are no naked eye planets visible in the evening sky this month. Uranus will be in the western sky and will be visible with binoculars or a small telescope about an hour after sunset. If the […]
From the Vaults: Live Shows Revisited Time to dig into the past and reminisce about some of the live concerts I have been privileged to attend. The list is too long to talk about more than a few at a time. The wheels really started rolling when I did an internet search under the […]
Perhaps it would be closer to the point if I entitled this FTV ‘Historical Snowmobiling Adventures’ as I haven’t ridden one since our kids were in elementary school. Grandpa Ed (my dad) always kept a Ski-doo Elan at camp he called ‘the kid’s machine’ so they could take a spin when we stopped by. […]
John Pepin of the Michigan Department of Natural Resources wrote an excellent article about the Craig Lake State Park (A Visit to Michigan’s Most Remote State Park – published in the Ontonagon Herald, April 10, 2019). The park straddles the Baraga – Marquette County line just north of Lake Michigamme. This article was interesting […]
By now, no one will be surprised in the slightest when I say, “I did not get to do a recap of the sixteenth edition of the Porcupine Mountain Music Festival in 2020 or 2021.” The idea of events, both major and minor, being canceled was a great disappointment to both fans and musicians. […]
Okay, this is a time when one of these ramblings must open with a disclaimer: This FTV is about the band, Mr. Big, but it started out as a musical trivia question posed to me at a local grocery emporium by Dan Bigge. The original question escapes me, but the answer was ‘Mr. Big’. […]
When we left Part 1, William Shatner had just had a close encounter with Gene Roddenberry who claimed to be working on a script for a new Star Trek vehicle. It would either become a low-budget TV movie or big screen feature, but Gene did not share the specifics with Bill. It was 1975 and […]
The last time my wife surprised me with a book she found at our local St. Vinnie’s, we both had a few moments of head scratching trying to remember if I had already read it. Published in 1994 by HarperCollins, Star Trek Movie Memories by William Shatner (with Chris Kreski) certainly seemed familiar. The […]