Musical ramblings from the manager
In the space of one week in early November 2021, two albums landed in my mailbox to remind me it was time to do a good old fashioned album review column. Regular readers of this column would no doubt agree the range of topics covered here is ‘eclectic’, but in the early days, the […]
We will begin this month’s tour of astronomical happenings with the planets visible in the south-southwest and southwestern sky at dusk. The brightest is Venus (magnitude – 4.7 on Dec 1 and -4.4 Dec 31) and located closest to the horizon to the lower right of Jupiter (mag. -4.7) and Saturn (mag. +1.5). All […]
The old saw, ‘there are no accidents,’ came from . . . whom? We all seem to use this phrase but have you ever wondered where it came from? Famous quotes tend to get corrupted, rearranged, and jumbled all the time (see Yogi Bera) with no apologies offered to whomever originated them. Oddly enough, the […]
Could it be that I am slipping? Scanning the FTV titles for the past ten months, I realized the entire year was about to pass without me writing about a drummer! How could this be? It isn’t for lack of drummers out there to write about. It is more a case of working through a […]
In one of the earlier segments of The Simpsons Tree House of Horrors, they do an extremely funny lampooning of The Shining (the Jack Nicholson version, only here called The Shinning). After Marge discovers Homer’s writing consists of nothing more sinister than, “Feeling fine,” she expresses cautious optimism about the situation. A sudden flash […]
We recently received a CD entitled Brewed In Buffalo by a guitar / organ / drum trio called Organ Fairchild. I am betting the title might give you a hint as to where they hail from. It only took a few emails (one with an attached teaser track) sent by guitarist Dave Ruch to […]
The crew at the West Coast Bureau sent me a copy of one of William L. Sullivan’s numerous books about hiking the great Oregonian out-of-doors. To best describe Sullivan’s passion for the topic of hiking in the wilderness, let me offer the following summary from the back cover of his 1988 opus Listening for […]
In the 2017 movie, Kingsman: The Golden Circle, Elton John plays himself, at least he does a spot on parody of the ‘Chicken Suit Elton John’. I do not recall exactly if John had really worn the chicken outfit on stage in the past, but it resembled a cross between the mass of feathers he […]
One of my favorite displays at the Michigan Iron Industry Museum outside of Negaunee is housed behind the door of an old bank vault. There is a graph inside showing how much money was generated by all of the big mineral rushes that swept this young nation. Manifest Destiny compelled the government to expand the […]
On his fifteenth birthday, March 1, 1959, Roger Daltrey was sent home from school and told to never return. The headmaster, Mr. Kibblewhite, gave him a parting shot he would never forget: “You’ll never make anything of your life, Daltrey.” Roger could only think to himself, “Thanks a lot, Mr. Kibblewhite,” as he headed home […]