(Start with Part I if you haven’t already read it.) Well, that didn’t take long – the tour of the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, that is. And the reason it didn’t take long is because the place is only about the size of a three-car garage. Nevertheless, what a thrill to be standing on the same black, linoleum floor where, back in the seventies, music was made by the likes of the Rolling Stones, Paul Simon and Art Garfunkle, Linda Rondstat, Sonny and Cher, Glen Frey, lynyrd Skynyrd, Boz Scaggs, Bob Seger, Bob Dylan and on and on and on (I wasn’t supposed to take any photos inside. I did, of course, but you’ll have to stop by the house to see them.) Continue “The Memphis road trip – Part 2”

Nothing like a long road trip to make a lad appreciate his home. Sweet home. Here’s the first of a two-part series on my excellent travel adventure from Florida, through Mississippi and on to Alabama, the “Heart of Dixie”, and back…

Sister Carol called me a few weeks ago and informed me that she and Bruce were contemplating a holiday excursion somewhere south of Michigan (that must have been an easy decision – pretty much everything is south of Michigan) and asked whether I would like to tag along. Continue “The Memphis road trip – Part 1”

Light travels at a rate of 186,000 miles per second, or about 670 million miles per hour. Thus, it doesn’t take very long for a photon to travel from, say, a light bulb to your retina – in the blink of an eye, if you will. This is also about how long it takes for Bank of America to reject my loan applications.

People sometimes do things too fast. They drive too fast. They eat too fast. You know what I mean. Sometimes they shoot off their mouths too fast. Sometimes people are too quick to judge, and end up hurting someone’s feelings. Continue “In the blink of an eye”

“The best or nothing!” Gottlieb Daimler, a German engineer and industrialist from the 1920s, is credited with coining this phrase. Herr Daimler was a co-founder of a company that would one day become Mercedes-Benz, now renowned for the quality of its automobiles, and which, fittingly, adopted his mantra as its company motto.

Coincidentally, my father was also an engineer. An industrial engineer, at that. Thus he, too, appreciated well-designed and well-built products. However, being half-Scot, he tended to be pretty tight with a greenback. Thus, he sometimes seemed to be torn between paying a premium for merchandise of quality and saving a buck or two on the cheaper model. It was not uncommon for his Scottish heritage to prevail in such matters.

Continue “Das beste oder nichts!”