Hammer Mill Days

Sing along with me (to the tune of Jingle Bells)... Oooooh! Christmas freak, Christmas freak, flying through the sun! Burn your charges to a crisp, your work is almost done... Oh! Hi, folks. Just celebrating the holiday the best way we know how... gasping for breath as our maniac pilot drives our sub-standard spacecraft through the center of a blue-hot star. Sure, I know what you're thinking - that's not the kind of Christmas I remember, right? Not the kind you used to know back home in Sheboygan. Well, I'm with you on that, as it happens. I just mean that we're celebrating as best we can under the circumstances... specifically, those of flying headlong through a burning sun. We try to think of it as a slightly hotter version of "'over the river and through the woods" ... though Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is quick to remind me that that is, in fact, a Thanksgiving song, and Thanksgiving was a month ago. Right again, Marvin. Where would we be wi...

Hi again, campers. Back to the Obama to-do list. Since the guy's on vacation, I imagine he might even be able to find the time to read this one. Pull it up on your blackberry while you're sitting on the beach. That's http://www.hammermilldays.com/ , Mr. President-Elect. There's a good chap. This week, domestic policy. Auto bailout. This is indeed a miserable business. The Bush administration has made such a muddle of the economy that it actually makes some of his other monumental failures pale in comparison. And yet when he came forward with the terms of his proposal, he did so in a somewhat self-righteous way, as if to lecture the industry on its failings. There are plenty of failures to take note of, that's for sure... but Bush is in no position to criticize, quite frankly. (It's a bit like Bernie Madoff giving advice on prudent investing.) What is particularly maddening is his focus on the auto workers. In what appears an attempt to throw his fellow Herbert ...

Don't see it? Well look again. That flaring star. That's the sun... our sun. The sun the earth orbits. Its temperature is so high it can turn this ship's hull to butter... and we're heading straight for it! Yikes... didn't know anyone was listening, there. Just rehearsing my lines for the upcoming Lost In Space favorite episodes playoff. Haven't heard of it? Not surprised. Oh... did you think I was talking about our own interstellar travels just then? Heh heh heh.... No, no. Not a bit of it. The flaring star we're headed straight towards is not the Earth's sun. It's another star, far hotter than our own... a blue dwarf, as it were. And it won't reduce our hull to butter. Oh, no... just vaporize it entirely, along with everything inside. So there's a difference between television melodrama and the real thing, my friends, and don't you forget it. Hollywood is the land of butter hulls. In real life, the term of art is "vaporization...

I had resolved to dedicate my blog rambling to a suggestion list for the incoming Obama administration over these few remaining weeks of the Bush II era. (Suggestion #9 - drop the homophobe preacher.) But sometimes events overtake us... events in the shape of a size ten shoe. Actually, two size ten shoes, tossed quite skillfully at the commander in chief himself, who dodged them - also quite skillfully - much as he's been able (up to this point, at least) to dodge responsibility for the mass death and destruction he has brought down upon Iraq. This was for the widows and orphans and the thousands killed, said Muntazer al-Zaidi as he hummed the second limo at our fearless (or clueless) leader. My first thought was, huh... an anger so pervasive that it was able to penetrate even the octuple security of the Green Zone's inner sanctum and make the president duck. And, as I'm sure someone has observed, it was no lame duck.... quite adept. Makes me wonder if people chuck things a...

What time is it? Say what ? Can't be that yet, can it? Seems like we just got up... and now it's night fall. Oh, right. Small planet. Fast rotation. Got it. Trouble with being on the road is you never know what town you're waking up in. Or what planet. That's bad enough when you have a set itinerary, but with Big Green ... mother of pearl! Even when you've got your wits about you, it's hard to figure out where the hell you're playing. Like this little planetoid Urich our pilot drove us into. It's not on any astronomical charts. It's as yet undiscovered and unacknowledged by the scientific community. So, when we walk out on stage to do a few numbers, what the hell do we shout out to the crowd of hideously misshapen extraterrestrial concert-goers? "Helllooooooooo....... whatever!" Got any suggestions? Let us know, damn it. It's disorienting, and I'm about as disorientated as anyone needs to be. (Except maybe the man-sized tuber... on...

Another segment of suggestions for president-elect Obama as he completes what feels like the longest presidential transition ever. Before I get into that, however, I will briefly join the chorus of people sounding off on Illinois governor Blagojevich and his jaw-dropping, bald-faced, kleptocratic frenzy to fill Obama's senate seat with the ass of the highest bidder. I think of myself as a fairly jaded individual, generally speaking, having trawled through the sludge of American politics most of my life on one level or another (never a very elevated one)... and yet somehow that transcript of Blagojevich saying "this thing is [fucking] golden" struck me as, well, appalling and depressing, even as it made me laugh. Just the sheer mind-numbing greed of it made me think, as Keith Olbermann said the other day, of Zero Mostel in the original movie "The Producers" ... "Oh! I want that money !!" Holy shit. Anyway, back to another Illinois politician of note, a ...

Good Fahrenheit, everybody! What a beautiful backhoe it turned out to be. I was wondering how Australia the wine barrel might get before the trout found its gerund. Forgive me, friends. My brain is addled. I've asked Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to correct my copy from here on in. It's been a long week on the road, let me tell you. Typically I make it to the end with all of my faculties intact, but this was the week we ended up on the mysterious (and as yet undiscovered) planet Neuton. It's a clever little globe, friends. Knows better than most how to conceal its identity. Hides behind red giants and blue dwarfs - quite ecumenical in that regard. We were diverted there by an unexpected event... a bout of binge drinking on the part of our new pilot Urich Von Braun, who took up with that party animal (in a manner of speaking) sFshzenKlyrn to slog their way through a quart and a half of Zenite lager. Not sure if you've ever had any of that particular micro-brew - ...

The president elect is getting an earful from just about everybody these days, not surprisingly. (His impossibly lame successor is now fully occupied with patching his own image. More on this later.) Surely the O-man won't mind hearing from one more stranger, one more time. Let's find out. Here are a few more things to bug him about. Somalia. Our government has been pumping cash into the Ethiopian regime for years, despite (or perhaps because of) their poor record on human rights, and in 2006 we assisted them in the invasion of Somalia, throwing that sorry nation into another tailspin of chaotic bloodletting (more than a decade of which it had only recently extricated itself from). Apparently the Bush administration had a problem with Somalia's ruling Council of Islamic Courts, claiming it was run by Al Qaida operatives - a claim that had about as much credibility as the White House's claims about Saddam Hussein's bin Laden ties. (I'm not talking fancy neckwear...

Electrodes to power. Turbines to speed. Do I have to say that every time before we lift off? Yeah, I do. What of it? Oh, yeah - hi, everyone. Big Green here, on the as-yet undiscovered companion (or "planet") circling the star Sirius, once again preparing for lift-off after a relatively successful string of gigs. What do I mean by "relatively successful"? Well, that's a somewhat qualified term, I will admit. Let me put a finer point on it. In the Big Green performance book, "success" is defined in degrees of survivability. "Relatively successful" means that few of the bottles tossed at us from the first five rows actually connected with their targets. Fortunately, with someone like sFshzenKlyrn in the group, there's a significantly lower likelihood of being hit by missiles of any kind, since our Zenite friend is himself a celestial object of indeterminate volume and mass, surrounded by complex magnetic fields that act like an invisib...

This week I'm going to rant about some issues that the new Obama administration should, in my humble opinion, address. However, it would be hard to post this without commenting on the Iraq/U.S. status of forces agreement approved on Thursday by the Iraqi parliament. This is, in essence, a timetable for withdrawal, setting an end date for our occupation of Iraq - something Bush repeatedly refused to do, used time and again to bait war opponents as being surrender monkeys, unsupportive of the troops, etc. ("Waving the white flag of surrender" as Sarah Palin put it.) So all of that.... was a lot of hot air again, right? Did you catch that too? Thought so. Okay, back to the O-man. As I wrote last week, Gaza and the D.R. of Congo are festering sores that should be attended to with all speed. There are many other foreign policy nightmares to dispel, and again, I don't think I need to mention Iraq and Afghanistan as part of that "short" list. Let's make the lis...

How the hell do I know how they found you? It was probably a mistake leaving your forwarding address. We were only going to be gone a month or two, damnit. Ah, well. Oh, hi, friends. No, we're not being pursued by bill collectors (at least, not out here in the constellation of Orion). I'm just fielding questions from Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who apparently received a piece of financial spam from some company that identifies itself as "Direct Capital", to wit: Sent: Tuesday, November 18, 2008 11:21 AM Subject: Call Me - Line of Credit Hi Marvin, I can help you get set up with a Line of Credit (secured or unsecured) for On Time Van Trans In if you have any purchases you need to make. It's pretty quick and easy. Give me a call at (877) 322-9235 and I can get you started. Kenneth __________________________ Kenneth Karpel Finance Manager Yeah, I know. It's got spam written all over it, right? Well, try telling that to Marvin. He almost nev...

There's been a lot of talk in the pundit universe and surrounding blogosphere about cabinet appointments. I suppose that's the kind of news I should expect to hear between now and January 20, aside from reports on the continuing economic disaster, now rivaling Iraq as Bush's biggest fuckup ever (if not in lives, certainly in dollars lost). For my own part, I'll reserve judgment until more of the Obama administration is in place. I'd like to spend this longish constitutional intermission between election day and inauguration day talking about the issues that I think should be a priority for the new regime. Not that they will listen, but... here it comes, Mr. President-Elect. This week, foreign policy. The Congo War. This is the deadliest conflict since World War II (unless, perhaps, you roll all of the Indochina wars together), and it has gotten very little attention in our national media. This is pretty typical treatment for sub-Saharan Africa, but honestly... more...

What the hell is this, Mitch? How could we be lost again ? We're using the freaking map. We're following all the dotted lines. Is that not Rigel? It's not ? Mother of pearl.... Oh, yeah... hi, friends. Having another little problem here with the navigation. Nothing new. We were making the passage from Aldebaran to Orion and Mitch is getting a little confused on which star is which. I keep telling him, you need to follow the arrow back from Mintaka, not forward to Sirius! (I'm like, be serious, and he's like, Sirius? Are you saying I'm a star? And I'm like...) So, of course, we overshoot Orion's belt by about a light-year, so we have to double back. Then Mitch gets Betelgeuse confused with Rigel, like he's looking at the whole freaking constellation upside-down. (Actually, the map was upside-down, so it wasn't entirely his fault.) And we're hunting in vain for the third companion (Rigel III) when, of course, there weren't any orbiting ...

Yes, the Bush Administration is rolling to a close - sprinting to the finish line, as Junior has said - and they seem remarkably unfazed by a record of failure unsurpassed in modern presidential history. Just this past week Bush took the stage at the global economic summit in Washington and defended "free market" capitalism, "free" trade, and related virtues so dramatically discredited of late, warning his fellow national leaders not to depart too drastically from the neoliberal order concocted by Washington and implemented by the I.M.F. and World Bank. I was not in the room, but I imagine there were a few grimaces, maybe a laugh or two, and perhaps a lot of inattention during Bush's remarks. Honestly, who is going to listen to the captain of the titanic as he lectures everyone on marine safety? How many of those people have one of those "Bush's Last Day" countdown clocks on their desks? (Or wish they had one?) Irony department: As Bush argued for ...

Good evening, Aldebaran! How is everybody out there? Thanks for coming out tonight! We love you, man... we love you! Hi, folks. Thought I'd offer you a transcript of our last performance in the Aldebaran system, on the big planet Mjumbo. Try to picture this in your head. (Are you trying? Good.) Imagine an enormous stadium - bigger than the astrodome, built along the rim of an enormous impact crater thousands of years old. Thousands of shapeless blobs of protoplasm in the seats, all holding lit matches. (This, we later learned, is something they do all the time on this planet - it burns off the bad air.) Now picture, if you will, the usual Big Green line-up of miscreants on the stage, plinking on keys, plucking at strings, banging on skins, and hollering into microphones. (Also adding mood, in a way that only the man-sized tuber can.) And swinging from the scaffolding, warning people about the "brown acid"? Marvin (my personal robot assistant). While in his magnetic lock ...

Looks like Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com was right. Never would have thought it. Barack Obama winning North Carolina? Virginia? Florida? Astounding. Pretty solid victory for a Democrat, I must say. (It bears remembering that Bill Clinton never broke 50% of the popular vote.) I will admit to a certain divided sentiment going into this election. On the one hand, it felt inevitable that Obama would win - not so much because of the polling, but because he just seemed like the person for this moment. On the other, I just found it hard to believe that this country would elect an African American guy named Barack Hussein Obama President of the United States. Up until the last couple of years, I'd always assumed that the first black president - if ever there was to be one at all - would be a Republican/conservative hawkish type, like Colin Powell.... you know, offset the "otherness" with a healthy dose of jingoistic cultural hegemony. But hey, w.t.f., so much for that. I gu...

Man, it's hot on Aldebaran. (How hot is it, Joe?) Well... it's hot enough to make the man-sized tuber sprout new branches. (W.t.f., Joe... that's hot and a half!) Damn right. Hi, there. Got a little sick of the monologue, so I thought I'd throw a call and response deal in the old blog. (Got to keep entertained somehow.) Big Green here, and I'm here to tell you that everything you learned about red giant stars is wrong. Sure, I know - they always told you that red giants are big, fat, overly cooled-down stars, right? Not so hot as those blue dwarfs, right? Well... looks like they was wrong, as they say in the old neighborhood (when somebody was wrong, that is). It's hot as all get-out up here. It's so freaking hot, Mitch Macaphee had to invent a sno-cone machine out of available materials... materials that included Marvin (my personal robot assistant), I regret to say. (Sorry, Marvin. I owe you one, man. Actually... I owe you a dozen, if memory serves.) I ...