Hammer Mill Days

One and a half G's. Holding steady. Watch that panel, Mitch. Watch it... watch it.... Two G's. Two and a half. Fuel consumption ratio rising. Damn it, Mitch - the panel, man... keep watching! Oh, hi, reader(s). What's up? Not so much, what's up with you? Yep, just another one of those days. You've had 'em. Piling all your gear into a space ship, strapping the man-sized tuber into his humidity controlled terrarium, pumping the tank full of highly-explosive fuel, and then hurtling headlong into space... all this before it dawns on you that you need a qualified pilot. Oh, sure... I know we have our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee. Big Green relies on him for just about everything these days... even things that he can't, well.... do very well... like piloting a spacecraft. What the fuck - we've used him before. But I swear to you, five minutes after we clear the gantry, Mitch turns to me and says, "Okay, so you're taking it from here, right?...

I saw in our local newspaper this week that a bridge will be named for one of the guys from this area who was killed in Iraq. Understandable gesture, to be sure, and I hope it brings some measure of solace to his family. If it does, they should dedicate a bridge to every one of the more than 4,300 sacrificed needlessly in that seemingly endless war. I doubt we have enough bridges to name for all the Iraqis who've died as a result of the 2003 invasion. (I don't know - are there a million bridges in America?) Whenever I hear about these dedications, monuments, memorials to war dead, I can't help but think of that eulogy Marc Antony delivered in Julius Caesar : "I come not to praise Caesar, but to bury him." We always hear about how they died "protecting our freedoms," when really they died because of our ignorance as a nation and our inability to stop this travesty from happening. This has nothing to do with how soldiers and their families feel about the ...