Hammer Mill Days

Here comes another one. Just like the other one. Where have I heard that before - anyone? Hello, creatures of the Web. It is I, here with news of what's happening in the remote corner of Central New York (itself a remote corner of somewhere else) known as the Cheney Hammer Mill. Stretch out your banjo strings, grease up your mouthharps, and start to wail - we're ready for some good old rustic hillside music, the kind you hear wafting through the pines on a late summer evening in the lower Adirondacks (or, perhaps, the upper Catskills... somewhere around there). Foot-stomping good. Yee ha. Do I sound convincing? Yeah, I know... not. Well, be that as it may, we do crank out a mock-country number every once in a while, usually some kind of political commentary, like High Horse . That seems the closest we can come to authentic north-woods music, and that's about as close as we WANT to come. Though I'm fond of its "woodyness", that quality tends to grate on Marvin ...

Thanks to the so-dubbed "underpants" bomber, the T.V. airwaves and blogosphere are all about terrorism, terrorism, terrorism , as if it's something that just appeared out of nowhere this week. Where the hell has everyone been? I think part of the dynamic at work here is the simple fact that television news people spend a lot of their time on airplanes, and the tightened security that results from these attempted bombings is a real inconvenience to the jet set. (Me? I wouldn't get on a plane these days unless somebody had a gun to my head.) Not sure if anyone else remembers, but a short time after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, it seemed like a lot of television commentators - the McLaughlin Group springs to mind - were complaining piteously about the demise of curbside check-in. Such an inconvenience. However will our civilization survive? (It has, somehow.) That helps to drive the news cycle a bit. I think my cousin had the perfect response at the time: That's it, n...