Hammer Mill Days

Turn it down a little more. Little more. Okay. Good. Can't hear that at all. Yeah, that's right - nothing. Much better. And... hey! Don't throw things at me! Sensitive artists, these cohorts of ours. Take Marvin (my personal robot assistant).... please. He's been playing the pipe organ on our latest recordings, and, well... a little goes a long way, let's put it that way. Ouch! Stop chucking stuff, man! Very sensitive. We've been asking him to go a little easy on the organ, and he treats that like an insult. (It does sound vaguely obscene, come to think of it.) So it looks like our patented arranging method of starting with every imaginable instrument and subtracting them one by one... that's not working so good. Thus far, we've only managed to eject the glockenspiel, the tin drum, the specially-tuned half-sticks of dynamite, the kazoo, and hell, we've got a long, long way to go before we get down to what's typically needed for a Big Green albu...

News from the front this week hasn't been so good. Deadly car bombings in Iraq (a.k.a. "normal land"). Policemen killed in Afghanistan, along with many others (including U.S. military people). Another unmanned drone attack in Pakistan, killing Lord knows who (sometimes the policy - like our weapons - seems to be on autopilot). And in Israel, chilling testimony from Israeli soldiers confirming the worst allegations about their attack on Gaza (euphemistically referred to by our media as a "war"), with stories of arbitrary, even random killings of Palestinian civilians, various acts of gratuitous brutality, a fanatical head chaplain from the settlements urging holy war. Pretty ugly stuff, all in all... though nothing all that surprising for the I.D.F. Despite their claims about "purity of arms", they have a history of oppressive behavior dating back to the 1948 war. And now it seems likely their next foreign minister will be a patent racist who has toyed ...