Hammer Mill Days

Be the king of the clones you can, you can have a mother ship up in space. Drop me off at Atlantis, man. Look there - red Mars has a face! Oh, hi, folks. Just reciting a few of Matt's lyrics in advance of the next performance. Perhaps you recognize the song - a little number called "Volcano Man" from our last album, International House . (You don't? Well... perhaps you haven't gotten round to picking up a copy. If so, you are proudly walking with the majority.) Actually, it's quite apropos of our current circumstances. We have, in effect, lifted off from the bizarro planet Earth (that home of many time zones) thanks to Ben Franklin's electrical advice, and we have made our way back through the equally strange time wormhole to present-day Neptune, which offers volcanoes very similar to those found in Matt's strange, strange song. Seems to me this would be the ideal place to film the video for "Volcano Man" (about time we got started on that li...

Has it really been eight years since we started this phase of the Afghanistan catastrophe? I can hardly believe it. Even so, those dark days of late 2001 are beginning to seem like a long time ago now. It was a difficult time, to be sure, on so many different levels - a nation still reeling from the 9/11 attacks, lashing out at one utterly destroyed by decades of warfare, much of it stoked by our government (with the cooperation of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia). We are now told that the place is being overrun by religious fanatics - the Taliban - who want to bring the place back to the 13th century. From where it stands now, that wouldn't be a very long trip. The Soviets pounded the living piss out of the place, to be sure, but we made a very conscious decision to fund and support hyper religious elements within Afghan society as the core of that nation's resistance efforts - some say before direct intervention by the Soviet military, and certainly thereafter. Our relationship wit...