Hammer Mill Days

Avast, me hardies! Full astern. Hoist the mizzen-mast. Lower the, I don't know... gang plank. Do something nautical, for chrissake. We've got some timbers to shiver. Sound like Treasure Island to you? Hah - if so, you've got a bad memory. Here in Big Green land, we don't know jack about literature. (We don't even know "Jack" about Jack and Jill , quite frankly. Feverishly undereducated lot.) And still we try, oh we try... as needs must. Just attempting to entertain the natives, and they're getting restless, my friends - restless as a slice of capicola on Super Bowl Sunday. That's right... the man-sized tuber's various and assorted relatives are still amongst us - putting down roots, you might say - and they have a healthy appetite for musicals. (Especially ones that feature pirates.) In as much as they now find themselves in a cultural backwater, they must satisfy themselves with our feeble attempts at melodrama. So we're putting on a lit...

We're dropping bombs on a ghetto. That is the kind of triumphant mission the Iraq war has devolved into - using high-tech air-delivered munitions on people who live on less than a dollar a day, hitting hospitals, killing children, all by accident (of course), though how you can drop bombs on a densely populated slum and not presume that you're going to kill innocent people is beyond my understanding. (By the standards established at Nuremberg, this doesn't hold any water as an excuse.) We're also dropping bombs on Somalia, the other other war - the one in which we took the side of an invader, the repressive government of Ethiopia, and played a key role in bringing Somalia back to the brink of famine and chaos. The UN and NGOs are issuing warnings about hunger in that sorry object of our attentions. They are also putting out grim advisories on Gaza, where relief programs are being stymied by the siege Israel is imposing on that territory's citizens, cutting off fuel...