Hammer Mill Days

No, I haven't seen your bass drum case. What do I look like, some kind of servant? By the way, where's my line mixer? What ? No... actually, you don't look like a servant. Why do you ask? Oh, sorry, friends. Just trying to get ahead of things here at the Cheney Hammer Mill. We've got that Aldebaran gig moving up on us fast - sure, sure, the date hasn't been set yet, but we've still got to be ready to go at a moment's notice. What the hell, it's 65 light years away for chrissake, plus or minus. So if our friends over at Loathsome Prick Records call us tomorrow and say the gig is next Thursday, we're going to need every minute. (Every single minute. No doubles, just singles.) And that's just the travel time. We're also going to need to give our mad science adviser, Mitch Macaphee, a brief interval to invent some means of getting us up there. What about our various space crafts, you ask? The ones that have carried so far and so faithfully o

"This isn't 1968." That was Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice just before embarking on her diplomatic mission to Georgia (the Republic of), to carry a cease fire agreement and presumably get a first-hand look at the smoldering ruins of yet another brilliant foreign policy initiative, this time played out in the region of her supposed expertise. If she was at all aware of the irony in her statement, she certainly gave no hint of it. She was, of course, referring to the USSR's invasion of Czechoslovakia (a country still very much in John McCain's world atlas) as a means of calling out Russia on its brutal violation of a neighboring nation's sovereignty. In her eagerness to link present-day Russia with the Soviet invasion of four decades ago, she appears to have forgotten somewhat more recent history... like her own administration's invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and subsequent occupation of both countries; like the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraq