Hammer Mill Days

Well, I guess we should have taken the symptoms a little more seriously. It seems the man-sized tuber has run amok. And there's nothing more dangerous than a crazed root vegetable. It's a little hard to describe the feeling of waking up in the middle of the night (mind you, in space... it's ALWAYS night) to find your spacecraft rolling end over end. My first thought was that Marvin (my personal robot assistant) had fallen asleep over his pulp novel and slumped over onto the navigational console. No, my friends... it was far worse than this. The man-sized tuber, who we thought was safely tucked away in his recuperative terrarium, had broken free of his restraints and taken his little cart on a joy ride through the control room, smashing delicate instruments with his big, knotty root-fists, and setting Mitch Macaphee's lab shoes on fire. I dragged myself upstairs to see the unlikely sight of Matt, John, and Mitch wrestling the tuber into a corner and pouring cranberry jui...

Politics' regular season has begun once again. We've been watching the training camp stuff all summer, and now it's time to play for the money, I guess. I'm not great with sports analogies, so that's as far as I'll go. No, wait - I lied... President Obama had the opening pitch on Wednesday night (okay, that's really it) and I'd say he did a pretty decent job of explaining what it is he wants to do. It doesn't exactly comport with what I think needs to happen to bring the United States to a place where we behave like a civilized modern industrial nation, but it's a bit clearer than it's been up to now. While my inclination is to support this - particularly if it includes the so-called "public option" - I am a bit concerned about what this will mean for people who have no coverage at all, or just the sort of lousy coverage I used to carry years ago. I'd like to hear more about that interim period during which the uninsured receive...