Hammer Mill Days

Mill boy to tuber, mill boy to tuber! Do you read, tuber? What's your position? Can't read. Can you turn up your gain? Roger. How 'bout this.... try turning down your lose. Ah... much better. Ah, you have returned. Good on you. Yes, as you may have surmised, the man-sized tuber... ahem , I mean the intrepid man-sized tuber has made his way into the remote past, fully 145 years ago or more, back to the time of Lincoln. His mission? Very simple... to apprehend the nefarious anti-matter Lincoln (one of our various hangers-on) who has somehow supplanted the actual president and begun to drive what's left of a Civil War-plagued nation into the sewer. Shouldn't be too difficult a task for a non-verbal overgrown root vegetable on a cart. At least, that's what our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee had assured me. He said that security was not as tight in those days as it is now, so it shouldn't be hard for the tuber to catch up with anti-Lincoln to deliver his ult...

Another week, another war... or at least the threat of same. Any week that starts with a nuclear explosion tends to focus the mind a bit, even if it isn't a very sharp focus in the case of many of those reacting to the recent actions of North Korea. It's as though we are born anew every six months or so, our past wiped clean, our journey set to begin again. Here we have the grim dividends of a craven policy towards northeast Asia that has become particularly nasty over the past 10 to 15 years (and especially so in the last eight). As it happens, we inched very close to a disastrous war back in 1994, then concluded a framework agreement with Pyongyang that would have provided them with a uranium reactor and ended their international isolation. Due to the vagaries of the Clinton administration and the maniac Gingrich Congress, neither of those provisions was honored. It was then left to the Bush II administration to do its usual job of pouring gasoline on a smoldering problem, pl...