Hammer Mill Days

Aw, tubey... what do you want to go and do that for? Put it down , tubey... put it down . Owwww! Not there — that's my freaking skull, you cruciferous moron! Ah, yes... there you are. Welcome. As you can see by the banner head (oh, say, can you see the banner head?), your belov'd "Notes from Sri Lanka" has been re-christened (or more properly speaking, re-agnosticized) "Hammer Mill Days" — just one component in our year-long rebranding project. Ahem ... did I just say that? Can't have been me. I must have been channeling our publicist from Loathsome Prick records — the one who keeps insisting that we re-brand ourselves as some kind of contemporary country or aging emo band (yuk!). Fucker put one of those Bluetooth antennae in my head while I was sleeping, so every once in a while I pop out with his latest PR drivel. Just to keep you straight on who's saying what, I'll just put all the publicist's words in some other color... like maroon, sa...

It was another one of those discouraging weeks in Iraq — you know the type. Bombs going off. People dying in large numbers. Very... well... dis cour aging. But far be it from our leaders to become discouraged with the project itself. And no, I don't mean this project they call "Middle East democracy", because that's just some policy hack yammering. I mean the real Iraq project involving permanent U.S. bases in country and an Iraqi government compliant with (or at least sensitive to) our wishes. Something tells me that project will withstand a good many setbacks of the type that involve loss of life and limb, so long as those lives and limbs belong only to the relatively poor and poorly connected. It was with this goal in mind that our leaders insisted on starting this disastrous war back in March 2003, and if they've shown an element of regret over that decision during the last four years, I've missed it. Actually, the "project" was dealt a minor ...