The third annual Fretboard Festival is expanding to two days this year to make room for more pickers and those who appreciate a good picking.

A celebration of Kalamazoo’s stringed heritage, the festival brought in an estimated 1,800 on a Sunday afternoon last year, organizer Jay Gavan said, making it one of the busiest events at the Kalamazoo Valley Museum.

The city’s luthier (the craft of making stringed instruments) history goes back to 1884, when Orville H. Gibson started a mandolin business at 114 S. Burdick St. The shop evolved into the Gibson Mandolin-Guitar Manufacturing Company Ltd., opening up a factory in 1917 at 225 Parsons St., where it still stands.

Source: mLive.com

Blue Cocktail, hors d’oeurves and as always….

Wonderful art by Gallery artists

Blue Gallery
16 S. Elm St.
Three Oaks, Michigan
269-756-9338 or
574-276-6001

Whether you’re an old pro or a first timer, by this summer Michigan will offer 56 wine tasting rooms where you can boost your wine competence in the presence of knowledgeable and non-judgemental winemakers.

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That sound you hear? Old Man Winter … laughing.

Motown lives — somewhere other than in the boxes of albums and singles boomers have stored away in their seldom used record collections these days.

Several classic Top 40 and R&B jocks have gotten together on http://www.hitsvilleradio.com playing vintage Detroit music of the ’60s and ’70s, mostly Motown.

*You will be propmted to download a player to listen which allows you to see artist/track info and will not interfere with other players or preferences. The download is safe but if you prefer you can opt to use a media player already installed on your system.*

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or go straight to the tunes

HitsvilleRadio.com classic detroit hits

Copenhagen’s doing it. So are Toronto, Chicago, Melbourne, Brisbane and Tel Aviv.

Now a Scio Township woman is hoping Ann Arbor joins the number of international cities in Earth Hour 2008.

During that hour – 8-9 p.m. Saturday – people will turn off all unnecessary lights to spread the message about global warming.

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Banning ocean freighters from the Great Lakes and requiring those ships to transfer cargo in Montreal would create more than a thousand new jobs for domestic shipping employees, truckers and rail employees, according to a new study.

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A report from a prestigious U.S. think-tank released Sunday argues that Canada and the U.S. should work together with the aim of creating a common market for commerce and labour by 2030 for the states and provinces in the Great Lakes basin.

“If it stood alone as a country,” says the report, “it would be the second biggest economic unit on Earth, second only to the U.S. economy as a whole and larger than Japan, the rising powers of China and India, and the traditional heavyweights of Germany and the U.K.”

Under this plan, by 2015, Canada and the U.S. should have mutually recognized credentials and identification to allow for the secure and unhindered movement of people across the border. As well, within seven years, the report envisages what it calls “seamless border pre-clearance of U.S.-Canadian goods transported as part of a comprehensive North American customs clearance system or fully compatible national systems.”

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