“About four hours before a launch, the Falcon 9 starts getting filled with an immense amount of liquid oxygen and rocket-grade kerosene.  Some of the liquid oxygen vents out of the rocket as it a…

      David Fitzpatrick’s new album Parachutes in Hurricanes is the latest disk to make its way north from Milwaukee via Gary Tanin’s Daystorm Records.  I was only able to give it a quic…

    In Part 1, we examined several ways that opening the Great Lakes to an ecological invasion of species began with the earliest attempts to ease transport of goods from the Atlantic Coast inland…

       Prior to 1900, the Chicago River flowed into Lake Michigan carrying with it a feted cargo of sewage from the growing metropolis of the same name.  Lake Michigan also served as the Ch…

      According to his friend John Byrne, Gerry Rafferty, “Went through hell and arrived at his final destination with a sense of peace and fulfilment, but what a journey.”  Occasional s…

      “The group weren’t waiting for long before Max Faget walked into the room.  Carrying a garment bag, the impish chief engineer, five feet six inches in his bow tie, jumped up on a d…