farlane

Happy National Jiffy Mix Day!

Posted on October 1, 2025October 1, 2025 by farlane

Jiffy Mix – Your Cornbread Comes From Right Here by Steve Brown

October 1st is the first ever National Jiffy Mix Day, a celebration of the family-owned Chelsea Milling Company that got its start in 1901 and launched the iconic Jiffy thanks to the vision of Mabel White Holmes:

When a friend of her twin sons Howard and Dudley visited their home, Mabel noticed the biscuits in the boy’s lunch were flat and unappetizing. She set out to find a way to create a pre-made mix which would assist the boy’s single father in the kitchen.

In 1930, with the support of her husband Howard Samuel Holmes, Mabel’s home-grown project became the first prepared baking mix sold to the public. The convenient, simple to use mix only required the addition of milk to produce perfect biscuits every time. By keeping their “JIFFY” brand baking mixes affordable, the Holmes’ new venture was able to help many families who were recovering from the effects of the Great Depression.

Read lots more from Jiffy & cheers to everyone who looks at a child’s lunch with an eye towards making it better!! There’s a poster from the Chelsea Area Chamber of Commerce below with info about the festivities on tap today that include games & prizes, a treasure hunt, food trucks & a visit from Detroit Lions Mascot Roary.

Steve passed on a couple years ago, but his photos and his love of history remain (click for his Michigan in Pictures features). Here are a few more pics of Chelsea – see more great shots from Chelsea in his Chelsea Michigan gallery on Flickr!

Mabel White Holmes inventor of Jiffy All Purpose Baking Mix

October Baseball starts TODAY for the Detroit Tigers

Posted on September 30, 2025September 30, 2025 by farlane

October Baseball by Allison Farrand / Detroit Tigers

For most of the season the Detroit Tigers were one of the best teams in baseball and racking up wins at an incredible rate. The Freep shares that all that changed:

The 6-seed Tigers (87-75) squandered what was a 15½-game lead over the 3-seed Guardians (88-74) in the division on July 8, and 9½ games on Sept. 10. Cleveland went 5-1 against Detroit in the final two weeks (and 8-5 overall this season) to take homefield in the wild-card series and give the Tigers a label no team ever wants: biggest division meltdown in MLB history.

Today, the slate is clean & the Tigers travel to Cleveland to meet the Guardians at 1:08pm in Game 1 of an American League wild-card series. Play(off) Ball!!

Fat Bear Week: Michigan Black Bear Edition

Posted on September 29, 2025 by farlane

Saturday Morning Stroll by Mark Miller

We interrupt our mostly Michigan content to bring you important news about Alaska’s Fat Bear Week online competition! Some of the largest brown bears on the planet make their home at Brooks River in Katmai National Park, and in addition to being adorably chonky, the fattest bears are best prepared for winter hibernation.

While Michigan doesn’t have brown bears, our native black bear population is also out there in the woods right now, actively searching for the raw materials to pack on the pounds. The Michigan DNR says that about about 13,000 American black bears live in Michigan. Most of them (around 11,000) live in the Upper Peninsula with around 1,700 in the northern Lower Peninsula. Their Living with Black Bears guide says that the black bear is the only species of bear with an average lifespan of 10 years in the wild. Male black bears live in an area about 100 square miles or more in size, while females live in smaller areas about 10 to 20 square miles. They are solitary animals, a sow (female bear who has birthed at least one cub) and her cubs may be seen together.

Black bears can have various color phases including black (most common in Michigan), brown and cinnamon. In Michigan, adult female black bears range from 100 to 250 pounds while adult males can weigh up to 400 pounds. Adult black bears measure about three feet high on all fours & five feet tall when standing upright.

Black bears are omnivorous & will travel great distances to find food, opportunistically feeding on both plants and animal including tender vegetation, nuts, berries, and insects. Black bears are generally fearful of humans and will leave if they are aware of your presence, but human foods, garbage, pet foods, & birdseed can definitely draw them to your door! In the rare circumstance that a bear doesn’t turn and leave, try to scare it off by yelling while leaving a clear, unobstructed escape route for the bear. If the bear stands its ground, makes threatening sounds or bluff charges, you are too close. Take slow steps backward while continuing to talk to the bear in a stern tone. In the rare event of an attack, fight back with a backpack. DO NOT run or play dead.

Mark captured these black bears out for a Saturday morning stroll near Empire back in June of 2015. You can see more in his In In My Backyard gallery on Flickr.

Here comes fall color!

Posted on September 26, 2025September 26, 2025 by farlane

M-22 Fall Color 2015 by Craig Sterken Photography

Sunday Drive in Autumn – M-22 – October 2010 by Craig Sterken Photography

Ten years ago I featured this photo from Craig of M-22 on the Leelanau Peninsula on the Michigan in Pictures Facebook. In addition to being a signature location for Pure Michigan fall color, the car happens to be next to the exact spot where I waited for the bus as a kid in the 1970s!

You can purchase this photo & see the awesome vistas this car is bound for as it drives south on M-22 in Craig’s Sleeping Bear Dunes gallery on his website. For sure follow him on Facebook or Instagram for his latest!

Comet of Unknown Origin

Posted on September 24, 2025 by farlane

Northern Lights and Comet Neowise by Gary Syrba

Our friends at EarthSky share that the latest observations of Comet 3I/ATLAS show it brightening more quickly than predicted:

Up until now, the interstellar comet had been brightening as expected. But now, the observations from mid-September 2025 are beginning to rise above the upward-sloping line of brightening that would have been typical for a comet nearing the sun.

(There has been a lot of talk that 3I/ATLAS might be an interstellar probe due to its great speed & a trajectory that takes it close to Jupiter, Mars & Earth before it slingshots away using the Sun’s gravitation.)

A team of scientists, led by Xabier Pérez-Couto of the University of A Coruña in Spain, has traced the path of interstellar object 3I/ATLAS back 10 million years. Indeed, this is only the 3rd-known object found traveling in our solar system that didn’t originate with our sun and its planets. Its trajectory tells us it must have come from another star system, but which one?

They traced the path back over 100 million astronomical units (9.3 quadrillion miles) but couldn’t find where it started towards Sol. You can read on for lots more!

Gary took these photos of the Northern Lights & Comet Neowise over Lake Michigan back in 2020. See more in his Night Skies gallery on Flickr and view & purchase Gary’s work on his website.

What lies beneath might be a shipwreck

Posted on September 23, 2025 by farlane

The Great Lakes Shipwreck Aurora by Bob Gudas

Janelle D. James of Bridge Magazine wrote last week that Michigan is facing the worst drought in over a decade. Although we’ve gotten some much needed rain with more on the way, the Michigan Storm Chasers share that it probably won’t be enough to make a significant difference. Rather than bum you out with ways that drought sucks, let’s focus on this cool photo & story from when drought was even worse!

When Bob shared this photo in October of 2012 he wrote, “The remains of the Great Lakes steamer Aurora. The wreck recently became visible due to record low waters in Lake Michigan basin. The 300 foot wooden steamer was built in 1887 and burned to the waterline at this spot in 1932. The stern was subsequently covered with water where it remained until the drought of 2012. Approximately 2 weeks ago the water receded off of the wreck. This view shows approximately 200 feet of the wreck with another 100 feet being buried under a sand dune.

A Shipwreck World article on the Aurora add that the Aurora was significant as one of the last great wooden steamships: When launched by the Murphy and Miller of Cleveland on August 23, 1887, the 290-foot, steam-driven propeller was the largest and most powerfully built wooden vessel on the Great Lakes. The 3000-ton vessel was initially owned by John Corrigan of the Aurora Mining Company of Milwaukee which paid $150,000 for its construction. It was used to ship iron ore from the Gogebic Range Ironwood, Michigan, to Cleveland and coal from Cleveland on the return trip.

View & purchase Bob’s work on his website, and check out a seasonally appropriate pic in Autumn’s Rainbow: the colors of fall on Michigan in Pictures!

Fall Equinox is today … mostly

Posted on September 22, 2025 by farlane

Last sunset of summer 2020 by Scott Glenn

Astronomical fall starts at 2:19 pm today (September 22, 2025), but that doesn’t mean that day & night are exactly equal for us here in Michigan. The very useful timeanddate.com shares that in addition to latitude & the refracting effect of our atmosphere:

One of the reasons why most locations on Earth do not enjoy exactly 12 hours of daytime and 12 hours of nighttime on the equinoxes is how sunrise and sunset are defined. If sunrise and sunset were defined as the moment the geometric center of the Sun passes the horizon, then the day and night would be exactly 12 hours long. But that is not the case. Sunrise and Sunset are defined as the exact moment the upper edge of the Sun’s disk touches the eastern and the western horizon, respectively. The time it takes for the Sun to fully set, which can be several minutes, makes the day just a bit longer than the night on the equinoxes.

The day with the same sunrise & sunset time is September 25th. The sun still does rise directly in the east & set directly in the west, so don’t forget to pack your sunglasses – a lot of our roads are laid out east/west making the sunrise and sunset around the equinox sun a positively blinding proposition!

Scott took this photo of the St Joseph Lighthouse on September 21, 2020. See more in his awesome Lighthouses gallery on Flickr & enjoy a selfie he took of the last summer sunset of 2014 below!

Last Summer Sunset Selfie by Scott Glenn

Gordie Howe International Bridge lights the night!

Posted on September 19, 2025 by farlane

Gordie Howe International Bridge lights the night! by Andrew Dean Aerial Photography

I heard rumors yesterday that were confirmed when I woke up this morning to Andrew’s eye-popping shots of the Gordie Howe International Bridge from Detroit to Canada all lit up! Andrew shares that this isn’t the final stage either. According to the Gordie Howe social media pages – the bridge will have 5,000 aesthetic lights that will illuminate the cables, towers, deck and approaches!! I’ve also got a flyover video from the Gordie Howe International Bridge below.

There are a couple more pics below. Head over to his Facebook page for the latest and check out his website for more about his drone photography services and to view & purchase his work.

Green Heron, Brown Alert

Posted on September 18, 2025 by farlane

Green Heron by Kevin Povenz

Click on Detroit shares that State Representatives Alicia St. Germaine and Ron Robinson have introduced a bill to establish a “Brown Alert” system modeled after existing emergency notification systems like Amber Alerts:

“Right after a raw sewage discharge, we shouldn’t have people paddleboarding on the Clinton River or launching kayaks. They need timely notifications so they can make an informed decision whether they want to go on that waterway,” St. Germaine said.

The proposed system would require county drain or public works commissioners to notify local emergency managers within 12 hours of the water reaching dangerous contamination levels.

“If something like this were to happen, people should be notified in real-time, and in a lot of cases, it’s not reported for weeks or sometimes months afterwards, and by then, what are you going to do about it?” Robinson said.

Many Harrison Township residents have witnessed signs of water contamination firsthand. “The other day, when we had a big rain and you could see chunks of what I’m going to call ‘things’ floating down the river that appeared to be untreated sewage. It was awful,” said Jim Constantino.

That’s a big no from me on floaty things in our rivers & lakes!! The other day I saw a green heron fishing in a containment pond that had a posted “Don’t Eat These Fish” warning. It always makes me sad when I see animals oblivious to our pollution, but hopefully making more people aware of it will lead to generating less of it.

Kevin took this shot of a young green heron last month in a marshy area at the Grand Ravines. See lots more in his Birds gallery on Flickr.

Falling for Leelanau with Jeff Lamb

Posted on September 16, 2025 by farlane

via leelanau.com…

Cornfield near Northport by jeff lamb

On mornings like this when fall is touching the tips of the leaves, I like to remember photographer & friend Jeff Lamb who passed on fourteen years ago. Here is a collection of photos that he shared from the Leelanau Peninsula back in the day.

See more in his Leelanau gallery and view photos from elsewhere in Michigan & the world on his Flickr.

PS: The pup is Sonny Boy, pictured on his fourth birthday, and he loved Leelanau too ;)