Hammer Mill Days

Where the hell is Marvin (my personal robot assistant)? Tubey? What the hell... is everyone out for a freaking curry? Right, right... I'll just open the mail bag, then. High time too - a few more pounds and it will collapse into a black hole, and that would be the end of everything . Okay, okay - I exaggerate. No need to worry. Got a couple of missives to open here. Let's start with something that bears domestic franking.... Dear Big Green, Hate to seem like a prick, but where the hell is that album you've been yakking about these past five years? - Furlin McGreevey, Basinstock, Idaho Hi, Furlin. Thanks for writing. And no worries - you're not a prick. (If you were, you'd work for our record label.) Fact is, I sympathize with you totally. I've gotten so sick of waiting for Big Green to release their next album, I've thought about resigning as head of their fan club. (Didn't have the heart to do it, damn it.) Fact is, we're running out of excuses... ...

Heard a McCain foreign policy adviser on NPR's All Things Considered this week. (I suppose that's a bit more relevant a news feature than the story about astronauts voting in space that ran a few days earlier on ludicrous Morning Edition .) The McCain guy had worked for prominent Republicans before, of course - namely Trent Lott and Donald Rumsfeld. That's right - Lott, the retrograde southern conservative politician who was so reflexively racist that he made a comment he couldn't back away from even in the wake of the G.O.P.'s 2002 congressional electoral victory... his foreign policy adviser. And, of course, Donald Rumsfeld, undoubtedly the most disastrous Defense Secretary since Robert McNamara (middle name: Strange )... How reassuring to know that McCain is getting the same advice Rummy enjoyed. So... what did this adviser to great minds have to say about the war in Iraq? Well, the NPR interviewer (Robert Siegel) stuck to narrow issues relating to the "me...