Christmas Song

[danrclem]

I think this song is hilarious. I guess it's really the video.

https://youtu.be/aeZ0BUc3kMw

[hermitcrab]

Da Yooper's they are funny...and they are the pride of upper Michigan... also don't for get that deer hunting classic movie .. "moon over Escanaba" staring Jeff Daniels...explains the importance of deer camp...

[TC Chris]

More precisely, "Escanaba in da Moonlight." Read here:
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0180679/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escanaba_in_da_Moonlight

Michigan culture....

Chris Campbell

[electra225]

I was told that fishing and eating cherries ( and doing the occasional polka) was Michigan culture, according to my wife who was born and raised in Traverse City. And buying your car at Chet Swanson's. I still have a Chet Swanson license plate.

THE best polka band I ever heard was in Empire, Michigan, in the hottest American Legion building on the face of the planet. "The Polka Kid" whose name was Don something. Five pieces, including a lady drummer. Fantastic.

[hermitcrab]

My mom's whole family was from Escanaba we would go visit a couple weeks in the summer ... the adults favorite hangout in the 70's was Wardy's bar in ore town ... 10 cent shells , you could get wasted on a buck...ahhh the good ole days

[TC Chris]

I was told that fishing and eating cherries ( and doing the occasional polka) was Michigan culture, according to my wife who was born and raised in Traverse City. And buying your car at Chet Swanson's. I still have a Chet Swanson license plate.

THE best polka band I ever heard was in Empire, Michigan, in the hottest American Legion building on the face of the planet. "The Polka Kid" whose name was Don something. Five pieces, including a lady drummer. Fantastic.

All true. Chet Swanson is long gone. We have a huge Buick dealer who's honest and a huge Chevy dealer who has engaged in unethical practices with a number of my clients. The center of polka culture is actually in Cedar, a few miles east of Empire. Over on the other side of the state where the Chevy lives, the public radio station has a Sunday a.m. polka show still.

Chris Campbell

[danrclem]

I've wanted to visit the Upper Peninsula for quite some time now. Hopefully I'll make it some day.

[electra225]

That polka band I mentioned was at the 50th wedding anniversary shindig for a friend of the wife's family. There was an old man named John who attended the party. They pulled up as close to the door with a Mercury Marquis as they could get to unload this old man and get him into the building. It took two large, strong men to help him inside. He was on a walker. Somebody mentioned how stove-up old John was getting compared to the last time they'd seen him. Whoever he was talking to said to wait until Don played the "Beer Barrel Polka". He'd bet that old John would grab the prettiest girl in the place and polka like he was 25 again. Sure enough, when they played the Beer Barrel Polka, John grabbed his grand-daughter and hit the dance floor, totally unaided and not needing assistance. He kicked up his heels like Lawrence Welk, returned to his chair with a smile on his face. He had to be helped out to the car backwards of the way he was helped into the building. Never seen anything like it, before nor since.

The party was in August in Michigan. There was no an air conditioner within 25 miles of the building they held the party in. Everybody was sweating like pigs, but nobody cared. They had plenty of beer. Maybe not a Michigan tradition but certainly one of this particular family. I'm not much on that kind of family stuff, but I really enjoyed this one.

[TC Chris]

I've wanted to visit the Upper Peninsula for quite some time now. Hopefully I'll make it some day.

It's wonderful. The U.P. became a part of Michigan as the consolation prize for losing the "Toledo strip," a disputed piece of territory along the southern state line. The trade wasn't viewed a quite fair back then, but in retrospect, Michigan got the better of the deal by far. Read about it here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toledo_War

Some of the oldest European settlements in the country are at Sault Ste. Marie ('the Soo") and St. Ignace. At the Soo Locks you can practically touch a 1000 foot iron ore or coal boat. They just have 5' clearance on each side. In the west are the Porcupine Mountains. Up north there's the Keweenaw Peninsula and historic mining areas. Marquette is a cool college town and the home of the elegant old courthouse where they filmed the movie "Anatomy of a Murder." There's the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. The Fayette State Park, a ghost town (now preserved) on the site of an iron smelting operation. St. Ignace has a huge annual car show:
https://www.saintignace.org/event/annua ... ming-soon/

Ernest Hemingway wrote some of best short stories about fishing in the U.P.

Those of us coming from the south get to cross our bridge--all Michiganians regard it as our special one--the Mackinac Bridge. It was the longest suspension bridge in the world when built and is still the 5th longest.

There's a lot more but the U.P. is just a delightful place.

Chris Campbell

[electra225]

The lakes have the clearest water I've ever seen. Must be able to see 25 feet down in Little Glen.

[danrclem]

I've wanted to visit the Upper Peninsula for quite some time now. Hopefully I'll make it some day.

It's wonderful. The U.P. became a part of Michigan as the consolation prize for losing the "Toledo strip," a disputed piece of territory along the southern state line. The trade wasn't viewed a quite fair back then, but in retrospect, Michigan got the better of the deal by far. Read about it here:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toledo_War

Some of the oldest European settlements in the country are at Sault Ste. Marie ('the Soo") and St. Ignace. At the Soo Locks you can practically touch a 1000 foot iron ore or coal boat. They just have 5' clearance on each side. In the west are the Porcupine Mountains. Up north there's the Keweenaw Peninsula and historic mining areas. Marquette is a cool college town and the home of the elegant old courthouse where they filmed the movie "Anatomy of a Murder." There's the Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore. The Fayette State Park, a ghost town (now preserved) on the site of an iron smelting operation. St. Ignace has a huge annual car show:
https://www.saintignace.org/event/annua ... ming-soon/

Ernest Hemingway wrote some of best short stories about fishing in the U.P.

Those of us coming from the south get to cross our bridge--all Michiganians regard it as our special one--the Mackinac Bridge. It was the longest suspension bridge in the world when built and is still the 5th longest.

There's a lot more but the U.P. is just a delightful place.

Chris Campbell

Have you ever crossed over on the ferry? I'm thinking that might be a nice experience. I've been on a ferry before but it was for a single vehicle and was going across a very small river.

[TC Chris]

The lakes have the clearest water I've ever seen. Must be able to see 25 feet down in Little Glen.

It is a mixed blessing. Clear, yes. But much clearer since the invading species of mussels arrived from Eastern Europe--first zebra mussels, then quagga mussels. They are filter feeders. They each filter about a liter a day and there are gazillions of them, since they have no natural predators here. Their filter-feeding meas that the plankton that native critters relied on are no longer part of the food web. And as water clarity increases, light penetrates farther, and what do plants require? Light and nutrients. Light gets down where it never reached before,and the mussels spew out feces, and suddenly we have plant growth where there were none before. And yeah, we also have invasive plants,often ones imported for aquarium use or that also may arrive as the mussels did--in the ballast water of ocean-going ships.

I've got an old sailboat over on Saginaw Bay (Lake Huron side of the state). The Bay is shallow and warmer than the open lakes, plus there's a lot of agricultural fertilizer runoff, so it has always been pretty green and opaque. One year my Dad and I were out for our first sail of the season and we looked down and saw the bottom. That was scary because it meant we should be aground. You just didn't see far down in the Bay. But between being early in the season and the filtering of the mussels, we were seeing the bottom in about 13 feet of water.

Chris Campbell

[Firedome]

Some of my favorite writing ever are the Nick Adams stories of Hemingway set in the UP, when the character went to mentally recuperate after the trauma of war. It's some of the best writing of the 20th century imo and part of what made EH an icon of literature.

Unfortunately zebra mussels have invaded Lake Champlain via the Hudson River as well, the one saving grace is that where our beach is it's all sandy bottom and zebra mussels need a gravelly or hard rocky substrate to attach to, so we've been spared them. But in some areas you must wear water shoes to swim as their sharp edges will cut feet to ribbons.

[TC Chris]

The bad news is that the quaggas are not as picky about firm substrates, nor about other environmental factors like depth and temperature, so they have largely displaced the zebras in the Great Lakes. The good news is that some fish species seem to be learning to eat them.

About 10 years ago I had returned from sailing, secured the boat on her mooring, and moved the dinghy astern while I put things away. When it came time to row ashore, the dingy was nowhere to be seen. But wait, is that it on shore? Sure enough,it had floated to almost exactly where it sits on shore. So I had two choices: one was to wave my arms and holler like an idiot until somebody saw me and came to my rescue (while providing lots of amusement for the patrons of the restaurant on shore). The other was to swim in quietly. So I made a little float on a PFD for my money, keys, etc. and jumped in. Pretty soon I was walking. Big mistake. My feet were shredded. It took a couple weeks to walk comfortably. Those mussels are razor sharp indeed.

Chris Campbell

[hermitcrab]

The fresh water intake for the tri-cites is near tawas... they are constantly clearing the zebra mussels from the water intake

[Firedome]

Speaking of Polka earlier, we're near Scranton PA which has a huge Eastern Euro descended population that came to work the coal mines. Being 1 hour away a lot of them ended up here, and many came here to Binghamton right off the boat to work in the huge Endicott-Johnson shoe factories, the world's largest at one time, so there's a large polka audience here as well. Every Saturday night on the local PBS WSKG TV we have a 1 hour "Let's Polka" show, very popular, where the audience can dance to the music. Several times over the last year or 2 they featured a family Polka group from Michigan, most were quite young, and very good!