Hammer Mill Days

Add a little cilantro. Mmmm.... probably not THAT much. Jesus christmas, Mitch - you're kind of extravagant with the spicing, aren't you. Now, don't get offended, I.... uh, Mitch....? There he goes again. That's the second time he's walked out on me in the course of preparing this meal. Sensitive scientists! Anyway, welcome to the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, where spirits are always elevated, music is ubiquitous, and science is a child's plaything. A lot of experimentation goes on here. We've seen it all, frankly, from selective negation of gravity to new formulae for cornmeal popovers. (Actually, the two things kind of go together.) What does it all have in common? None of the results are published, that's what. What happens at the mill stays at the mill, my friends. Just ask Mitch Macaphee, the mad (and extremely thin-skinned, apparently) scientist who advises us on all matters relating to bubbling beakers of goo, primitive electrodes, and massive p...

Torture is in the news again, big time. I just wrote a post about it on a local newspaper's Web site , in response to someone's comment about the effectiveness of waterboarding. The writer - whose anonymous user name suggests he/she is a veteran - makes the claim that waterboarding produced the intelligence that foiled the plot to fly a jetliner into the library tower in Los Angeles. Of course, the claim falls apart on the most superficial level. The Bush administration took credit for foiling the plot in February of 2002; the torture ("enhanced interrogation") program went into effect in August of that year. I can understand the writer's confusion, though. There has been so much garbled noise around this issue in the past few weeks, much of it stirred up by that bloated ex-Vice President of ours, whom Gore Vidal once likened to "300 pounds of condemned veal in a gray suit." Yes, Dick Cheney, evident war criminal, wants more memos released - the ones tha...