Play Ball! Detroit Tiger tickets on sale today!

Comerica Park, photo by Mario.Q.

Tickets for the Detroit Tigers’ 2009 regular season home games at Comerica Park go on sale today (March 7) at 10 AM. Opening Day tickets are available – there’s a four ticket per person limit on Opening Day tickets. To get your tickets, head over to the Detroit Tigers web site. There’s a great Tiger highlight video there but I wonder why they’re saying “don’t miss Miguel Cabrera and company in action at Comerica Park” on the site. Placido? Magglio? Carlos? Did I miss something?

Check out Mario’s Detroit Tigers photos (slideshow) – like this one they’re all uploaded wallpapery delicious! Also have a look at the Tigers’ baseball show from the Absolute Michigan pool.

And oh yeah: GO TIGERS!

Women’s Suffrage in Michigan

Woman Suffrage Tent, 1912 Michigan State Fair, courtesy the Archives of Michigan

March is Women’s History Month in Michigan and this month’s Image of the Month from the Archives of Michigan tells of the arduous but eventually successful process that eventually secured the right to vote for women in Michigan with the ratification of the nineteenth amendment in 1919 (Michigan was one of the first 3 states to ratify).

In Michigan, that struggle spanned at least seven decades. In 1846, a woman named Ernestine Rose spoke to the Michigan legislature about the need for woman suffrage. This was two years before the first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, New York. In 1849, a Michigan state Senate committee proposed a “universal suffrage” amendment to the Michigan constitution. This would have granted voting rights to both women and African Americans, but no action was taken on the proposal. A woman suffrage bill did not come before the state legislature again until 1866. It was defeated by only one vote.

Click through to read the rest of a struggle that spanned lifetimes.

Ice bridge

Ice bridge, photo by Blondieyooper.

Winter at Lake Superior, Marquette, Michigan. Be sure to check it out bigger.

You can see other photos April took on March 3, 2009 and many more great shots in her Winter in the UP set (slideshow).

More great winter pics on our Michigan Winter Wallpaper page!

Invincible Summer

The trail to Summer, photo by the pentax hammer.

In the depth of winter I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.
~ Albert Camus

A note with these words was the first thing I read this morning. For a few days I’ve been watching a dark wave building, in Michigan and across the country as we realize that our problems are a whole lot more serious than most of us thought.

In times like this, it’s a good thing to have a bit of summer in your heart – is it in you?

This photo can (and should) be seen larger on black or in Gary’s Anywhere but here – The rest of Michigan set (slideshow).

Also be sure to check out the Summer slideshow from the Absolute Michigan pool!

White Shoal Lighthouse

White Shoal Lighthouse, photo by AdamMI88.

A few days ago we had a ghostly tale from Waugoshance Shoal Lighthouse on Absolute Michigan. When I was researching that, I read on Terry Pepper’s page about Waugoshance Light that as much as the reputed keeper’s ghost, the construction of the more powerful White Shoal Light led to the decommissioning of Waugoshance. It was neat to see this photo of White Shoal Light show up in the Absolute Michigan pool on Flickr.

The White Shoals are located 20 miles east of Mackinac Point and just northwest of Waugoshance Island. So shallow that they break the surface in places, they long presented a hazard to navigation for ships entering the Straits of Mackinac. On his White Shoal Lighthouse page, Terry relates that beginning in October of 1891, the Lightship LV56 anchored at White Shoal during the shipping season for 19 years. Finally in 1907 funds were appropriated for a permanent lighthouse:

Spring of 1908 saw work begin on the White Shoal light on two separate fronts. While a crew at the site leveled a one hundred and two-foot square area on the shoal through the addition and careful placement of loads of stone, a second crew worked on building a timber crib on shore at St. Ignace. Seventy-two feet square and eighteen and a half feet high, the huge crib contained 400,000 square feet of lumber, and on completion was slowly towed out to the shoal and centered over the leveled lake bottom. Once in location, the crib was filled with 4,000 tons of stone until it sank to a point at which its uppermost surface was level and two feet below the water’s surface.

On top of this crib, a seventy-foot square stone block base was constructed to a total height of four feet, with the remainder of the pier being of poured concrete atop the block base. With the base complete, an acetylene-powered lens lantern was installed atop a temporary steel skeletal tower on December 5th, and with the onset of winter storms, work at the shoal ended for the season.

Seeing the Light has much more about the construction and history of White Shoal Light including shots of the tower and crib under construction and information about lighthouse tours offered by Shepler’s Ferry, on which you can see White Shoal, Waugoshance and Gray’s Reef Lights.

Wikipedia’s entry for the White Shoal Light notes that White Shoal is the only aluminum-topped lighthouse on the Great Lakes, the only ‘barber pole’ lighthouse in the United States and is the lighthouse featured on Michigan’s Save Our Lights license plate. There’s also a link to really cool Google Map of lighthouses in northern Lake Michigan. There’s a few more pics of White Shoal at boatnerd.

Adam took this photo in August of 2008 and it’s part of his Lighthouses set (slideshow). From the pics, I’m guessing he took that lighthouse cruise.

Above Michigan … and the Au Sable River

Au Sable River, photo by Marge Beaver

Today’s photo comes from my coffee table … or more precisely a book that’s on my coffee table. The book is Above the North and it features the photography of Michigan aerial photographer Marge Beaver. From the inside cover:

“These stunning bird’s-eye views offer rare and beautiful glimpses of northern Michigan’s unique terrain from the lofty perch of photographer Marge Beaver’s camera lens. Beaver’s breathtaking four-season photographs transform our view of Michigan into a magical land. From the Sleeping Bear Dune in winter with its vertiginous sandy edifice, to a Coast Guard cutter shattering the icy Straits, to the ghostly silhouette of a sunken ship and the brilliant turquoise waters of Crystal, Torch, Elk, Charlevoix, and Glen lakes, these are images of Michigan as you’ve never seen her before. All of these, plus arresting photographs of orchards in snowy-white bloom, winding rivers, and city harbors make this book a collector’s item for anyone who loves Michigan.”

Marge’s web site has great aerial shots from Alpena to White Lake and points in between. Check out her aerials of marinas & harbors, lighthouses, Detroit and many more locations in and out of Michigan. You can check out a cool interview with Marge right here.