Hammer Mill Days

Is this the emergency alert button? No? Okay - the red one. Gotcha. Now... which one is the emergency telephone? No, I'm not an idiot! It's goddamn dark in here! Well, we're off. Off the bottom of the elevator shaft, at least. Whoever thought a space elevator to Aldebaran was a good idea? Oh, yes... Mitch Macaphee. Our mad science advisor. Creator of Marvin (my personal robot assistant). Winner of the coveted Igor prize for depraved experimentation. Yes... that Mitch Macaphee.... he is the guy who thought of this seriously under-engineered contraption. Hey, we fucked up - we trusted him. Not one of us (with the exception of Matt) has any familiarity at all with the concepts of mad science. If we'd done our homework in Mrs. Buehler's class, we might have known better. But no, not us... we just read our comic books (most entertaining!) and traded our lunch money for second-hand smokes ( cough !). In the meantime, geeky kids like Mitch were collecting the knowledg...

Skipped a week on you. Well, no sweat, friends, because today I'm loaded for bear. And no, it's not just because the Republican party is playing their usual race-baiting, terror-scare election game (no surprise). It's also because our two running wars are politically off the table, or - worse yet - are seen somehow as a stronger issue for that septuagenarian crank McCain, who was dead wrong on Iraq from the beginning and shows every indication of making the same type of error again and again. I read an Associated Press article the other day that nearly blew the top of my head off. The Bush administration is still negotiating its "security pact" or status of forces agreement with the government of Iraq, of course, and the Iraqi position is that they want the last U.S. troops to leave their country by the end of 2011, unless they request us to stay (and we, of course, agree). Our negotiators are trying to talk them out of it. Why the fuck are they doing that? And w...