Hammer Mill Days

Ow! Bloody roofing beams! Are bicycle helmets always made of styrofoam? I thought they employed something slightly harder in their construction. No? Gotcha. Anyway.... ow! Oh, hi out there in cyberland. No, we haven't elected to return to interstellar space after only one full week back on Earth. Lawd, no. I'm cracking my skull on the roof beams of our beloved abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, here on terra firma. I and my Big Green colleagues are being subjected to yet another one of Mitch Macaphee's haywire mad-science experiments involving gravity, sunlight, air thickness, blah-blah-blah. I don't know what all else, as they say. In any case, he's got the gravity component of it right... in as much as we ain't got any. Somehow Mitch has stumbled upon a formula (or process) for selectively negating gravity without the aid of, say, a jet pack or motorized propeller beanie. I think he does it with dominos... stacks them end-to-end. (Don't ask me how it works, ...

Not sure how I got through last week's rant without some mention of the elections in Iraq, fledgling democracy under our protective and nurturing (right) wing. Though the official results may not be in for some time, the winner appears to be Prime Minister Maliki's Dawa party, at the expense of the more religious Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (formerly the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, an exile group formed in Iran during the Iran/Iraq war, now enjoying close ties to both Washington and Tehran). Probably the most interesting thing about these provincial elections - something underreported in the U.S. press - is the degree to which this was a vote for an end to the U.S. occupation. The status of forces agreement that Maliki negotiated with Bush late last year pretty strongly rejects any enduring U.S. presence on Iraqi soil - no permanent bases, etc. If that agreement is acted on as drafted, we'll be out in a matter of months. Bush essentially signed wh...