Cliffs Riffs - Stuph n Nonsense

Hello Everyone, my name is Cliff and I am a chocolatemilkaholic. Hi Cliff. My decades long love affair with chocolate milk brings me dangerously close to falling into the abyss of abject milk snobbery. I will do my best to avoid this trap. A few years ago I happily discovered Country Dairy: they are a multi-generational family owned dairy in New Era, Michigan. It is a great place to visit if you are in the area - they have tours, great ice cream, fun things for kids, etc. Visit Country Dairy Website. I was happily convinced that theirs was THE BEST chocolate milk I had ever enjoyed. I like that Country Dairy is family owned and that they do not feed their cows hormones to get more milk from them. By the way, they make great ice cream and other dairy products as well. Two years ago, I found out about Mooville - another family owned dairy in Michigan. They don't use hormones and like Country Dairy they have a great line up of dairy products and you can visit thei...

Should we let this place burn because of poor location? I have been following the fires in the Colorado mountains for a couple reasons. My sister and her husband live up there and I am relieved that their home has been spared. The second reason is slightly more complex. I recall reading several posts on Facebook from people who lived in Colorado, specifically in the mountains, when Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005. I am not referring to only those remarks about the judgement of God falling on NOLA from the fundamentalist organizations like Focus on The Family and others with HQs in Colorado Springs. Those are enough on their own to foster comments about what God might be judging Colorado Springs for, but I remember reading remarks where mountain dwellers were chiding (and I am being polite by using "chiding") the residents of NOLA for not taking care of their own problems. These statements ran along the lines of "Hey, what do you expect - you live below sea level....

Before I commence this rant, let me give you a little personal history as far as my experience with sound. I first ran lights and/or sound when I was a teenager as part of the Hope College summer repertory theatre in 1975 and did some work in the Grand Rapids Civic Theatre as well. In the early 80's I was the co-owner of a small sound studio where we produced commercial jingles, narration for industrial films and one epic, seven song, 18 minute surround sound mixed production for the now defunct Project Nature in Gladwin Michigan which involved recording tympani, a harp, live drums, etc. etc. I also worked for several years for WITL-FM in Lansing. In addition to my duties selling air time, I was the sound man for the WITL-O-Meters - the station house band and we played indoor and outdoor venues all over Mid-Michigan. We opened for the likes of the great Johnny Cash and Tim McGraw along with a host of others. I would spend several hours setting up our equipment which included a ...

Spent some time in a totally alien environment today - I went to watch some of the matches in the 2012 Table Tennis U.S. Open Tournament which was held for the second year in a row right in downtown Grand Rapids. This event goes on for 5 days and has players from all over the world. I read about it last week and really wanted to experience it for myself. It was a very different world - I was waaaaay in the minority in a couple of ways. First and foremost because I didn't have much of a clue as to how things worked. Sure, I have played "ping-pong", but this is a whole 'nother world. These are world class players of all ages from all over the US and lots of other countries as well. Secondly, I was in the racial minority as well. The largest percentage of people were Oriental by far - old white men were few and far between! I heard foreign languages being spoken everywhere as I walked around. It was cool to be surrounded by the totally unique sporting culture of ta...