Hammer Mill Days

Spacemen to the left of me. Spacemen to the right of me. Spacemen above my head. And beneath my soles? Astroturf. That's right... astroturf. Welcome back, Big Green -ites, to a world turned upside-down. Well, not upside-down exactly... probably more like 180 degrees clockwise, with a slight southward dip on the "y" axis. Either way, things are not what they used to be. This neighborhood has gone downhill fast. Jeebus christmas - just three weeks after the first spaceship arrived and we're practically the only people in this village who were born on the planet Earth. (All except Big Zamboola, of course, who was born on... on... well, on him self , because he is, in fact, himself a planet... or planetoid.) Those strange, lawn-obsessed space people have brought their interstellar modular homes to our sleepy little town and set up their own community superimposed over ours. WTF! You know, it wouldn't be so bad to have all of these new neighbors if they had taken up r...

It's one thing to try and scope out why someone would want to gun down dozens of people in cold blood; it's quite another to consider how so clearly disturbed an individual could get his twitchy hands on such deadly weapons in the first place. The first problem is one experts, talking heads, journalists, psychologists, etc., will be grappling with on television and in print for years to come. The second is a bit simpler: mail order, gun shops, and Wal*Mart. Obviously if you haven't yet killed anyone or committed a serious crime but are, in fact, dead set on annihilating a whole building full of people, it's not so hard to procure military-grade weapons designed to mow down as many folks as possible in the least amount of time. And you can even buy your ammo within easy walking distance of campus in Virginia and elsewhere in our bullet-headed nation. Sure, we have a culture of violence. It's not something primarily driven by media consumption - it's more a matter...