Hammer Mill Days

No coins? Hmmm... check my other pants. I was sure I had some silver in there. Valuable, precious silver. No? Oh well. There's always the jar on my nightstand. What do you mean you knocked it over?! Yes, yes, my friends - it's just as it sounds. Broke again, fighting the mice for scraps of cheese. Matt just had a smack-down with a praying mantis that was making off with a fragment of stale halvah. (Did Matt prevail? Let us pray.) I've asked Big Green's mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, to put his considerable skills to good effect and invent us some money (or maybe a pizza), but he can't be bothered with such trifles.... not when he's preoccupied with his unified field theory. (Not going so well, I perceive.) And now we're rifling through drawers (not with real rifles, you understand), rummaging through garments, and shaking the hell out of every cup and jar in the joint looking for loose change with which to keep our lights on for another week. What? Wh

Another young person from my part of the world was killed in Afghanistan this past week - a Marine who grew up a stone's throw away from where my sisters lived in one of the many small towns that dot the landscape of central New York. He's the second local K.I.A. in the space of about a month or so, and it's disgusting. What the hell are these kids dying for? How could we justify (if any justification were required before allowing it to happen) sending them into this hopeless situation, sacrificing life and limb for a cause most people in America wouldn't give up a meal at Wendy's to advance? Pundits and politicians never tire of telling us that we're a nation at war, but it's not so - we're a nation whose all-volunteer military is at war, while the rest of us busy ourselves with other matters. This is the trap that empires are liable to fall into. The foreign legion will protect our overseas possessions, while the homeland is bled dry by the cost of und