Hammer Mill Days

Ant lers? Not ant lers. That won’t work at all . You need something more simian looking. A chimp’s muzzle, perhaps, or lemur tail. Prehensile, yes… that’ll do the trick. Oh, it’s you again, mister Spindle-legs. (A quote from Lost In Space , sorry to say.) Welcome back aboard the S. S. something sacred, where yours truly is coughing up copy for the commodore. Who’s the commodore? Well, that’s the guy in charge of Loathsome Prick records – the fellow who sent us off on this fool’s errand to planet Mars, where Big Green is slogging through some promotional performances to support the release of our next album… the one that ain’t done yet. Want a good time? Try careering 143 million miles through interplanetary space in a converted piece of playground equipment piloted by a crew of genetically modified, oversized root vegetables. You don’t know the meaning of the word “excitement” until you’ve done that once or twice. (Frankly, once is enough for me.) As many of you will have surmised,

The casualty numbers are in for October, and man god damn things are going swimmingly over in Iraq. Only 34 U.S. dead - that's just a little more than one a day (a bitter pill for someone to swallow, but no one who counts, apparently). I don't recall what the Iraqi corpse figure was - it had four digits, for sure - but (and this is important!) the first digit was smaller than last month's. Progress! Or so we're told by the administration, the "commanders in the field", the mainstream press, and supporters of the "surge" in general. This is, after all, best framed (from their point of view) as some kind of ball game wherein the winning team is the one with the highest (or lowest) score. It makes the war easier to sell, report on, and defend. But war differs from sports in one very important respect - in sports the object is simply to win, so numbers count; on the other hand, there is typically a strategic or tactical purpose to any war, and this one