Hammer Mill Days

Is the car ready? Good. Engine running? Double good. No, I'm not worried about wasting gas. Last thing on my mind, damnit. Don't forget your driving shoes - there's a good chap. Hello again. Yes, we're planning a little day trip. Nothing to get too excited about - just a brief opportunity to get our butts out of this place. Plenty of incentives to do just that, now that the gravity at the Cheney Hammer Mill is out of control Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has become a walking, talking, pop-up ad machine. Oh, yes... you heard me right. Ever since he opened that noxious email and got himself taken over by a pernicious computer virus, strange things have been happening to our mechanical friend. First, B-movies started playing on his video terminal. (He was like a walking drive-in for a few days.) Next came the pop-up ads.... kind of like what you get online, except these are little signs and banners that literally pop-up out of his head at unpredictable intervals. So

See any good speeches this week? In point of fact, I did watch Obama's all the way through, though I didn't bother with Jindal's response, and now I'm kind of sorry, frankly. The excerpts I've seen were pretty hilarious. I'm not sure where they were going with that entrance... it just looked strange. In any case, the content was probably the most ridiculous part - an apparently apocryphal story about intervening during Hurricane Katrina to get those rescue boats through all that bureaucratic red tape so they could start saving people. Then there's the laundry list of wasteful projects in the stimulus plan, like monitoring volcanoes (goodness, what a bad idea... especially from the standpoint of the governor of Louisiana!) and mag-lev trains from "Disneyland" to Las Vegas. Interesting side note - the day after his speech, Governor Jindal reportedly went to Disneyworld. (Apparently it's all about how you get there.) Pretty goofy shit... but then