Hammer Mill Days

Bit of turbulence. Nothing to worry about. Just large hunks of jagged rock hurtling through space at blinding speed, missing our paper-thin titanium hull by feet (if not inches). So pull up a bamboo mat and relax. Yes, we're still bobbing our way home at sub-standard speed in our partially-disabled rent-a-spacewreck. Our ENTER THE MIND: THE ULTIMATE BIG GREEN EXPERIENCE interstellar tour now shrinking in the rearview mirror, we have managed to limp as far as the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, where we are now dodging larger than average planetoids, popcorn-like fragments, and other assorted celestial debris (including some familiar looking stuff I last saw in the crawlspace above my old garage from seventeen rentals ago.... always wondered what became of that). Since there's precious little for any of us to do out here, and since Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has taken it upon himself to do all the cooking for our merry little band of wanderers (frozen waffles a...

Wtf, what a year, eh? At least those of us who made it through... made it through. Just a few closing thoughts before that ludicrously pointless ball of Christmas tree lights falls, signaling the arbitrary beginning to another great year. Economy. At the end of a tumultuous year, we are still at nearly 10% unemployment as it is currently calculated, meaning that it's probably closer to 16% in real terms, maybe higher. I can tell you that, of the family members and close friends who have lost a job in the past year to 18 months, 2 out of 3 are still looking for work. This is probably a familiar story across the country. And yet, some seem to be doing quite well. American businesses - and I mean BIG businesses - have amassed huge piles of cash over the past year. The stock market - and therefore, investors - are doing better. And on Wall Street, the bonuses were fatter than a Christmas goose once again. (They've got a tax cut on the way, too.) Even with all that, they managed to...

We'll be home for Christmas? Only in your dreams. Yes, I know... we should do the decent, right? Be with our families, etc. Alas, technology makes clueless monkeys of us all. This horrible rust-bucket leftover from some forgotten interplanetary invasion we rented as transport during our interstellar tour has blown yet another gasket or some such thing, per our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee. He used a lot of big words, none of which I'd ever heard before (though Matt was familiar with several of them... strange...). The upshot is, we're chugging along at subnormal speed, making our leisurely way back to Earth from the Kuiper Belt - last stop on the ENTER THE MIND: THE ULTIMATE BIG GREEN EXPERIENCE interstellar tour. So... like my cat Macky, we're making the best of it. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has fashioned a Christmas tree out of whatever was available. The mansized tuber has been coaxed out of his terrarium to serve as the aforementioned "whateve...

After a whirlwind lame duck session for the 111th Congress, it appears as though gays will soon be able to serve openly in the military. I must emphasize the modifier "soon", as it is not yet safe to make your sexual orientation known in the service, and it won't be until the Administration and the Pentagon completes their review process. None the less, his was a long time coming, and I am glad for those in uniform for whom the repeal of DADT means a kind of liberation. DADT was implemented before we started asking way too much of our military - multiple deployments to multiple simultaneous occupations, heavy fighting over stretches of months at a time, high casualty rates, etc. - and it has simply outlived its mandate, in addition to being dead wrong from the start. That's all good, but it's just a step in the right direction. Gay Americans are still second-class citizens, barred from full civil rights as of this moment. As of now, there is an institutional neces...

That looks like my first pair of Chuck Taylors. Always wondered what happened to them. And there's that bike that got stolen when I was twelve. And some pocket lint that looks very familiar. Oh, hi, friends of Big Green . Glad this is getting out to you. WiFi is a little unreliable out here in the midst of the Kuiper Belt... all these particles and planetoids cause a boatload of interference, as you might well imagine. Yes, we did manage to navigate our way through the black hole that had parked itself next to that annoying Goldilocks Planet our label talked us into playing. (We now know why the Gliesians call the black hole "Papa Bear"). The advice we'd been given took us right into the old vortex. Turns out it's just a transdimensional expressway back to the Kuiper Belt. Bit of good luck, that. So, yeah... we're here for the final leg of our somewhat anti-climactic ENTER THE MIND: THE ULTIMATE BIG GREEN EXPERIENCE interstellar tour 2010. Why anti-climactic? ...

I've heard a kind of depressing story the last couple of days about a bureau of the Postal Service tasked with opening letters to Santa Claus. Here's a somewhat strange version from NPR's All Things Considered in which Robert Siegel tries to lighten things up with some lame quips. They've been finding that, this year, kids are tending less to ask for gaming consoles and the like than stuff like warm coats, shoes, etc. Just a hint of how rough people have it these days - a peek into the Dickensian hellscape inhabited by the millions upon millions of children (and their parents) living in poverty. Our top-down economy is literally killing hope before it even has the chance to learn how to express itself. I'm not a practicing Christian, nor am I big on organized religion in general, but if there's one thing valuable about the Christmas season it's the sense of possibility it can engender in people - not so much the expectation of personal gain, but more the no...

Well, I haven't seen it. What kind of belt is it? Nothing of the kind. What am I, your valet? Damn it, man - use your eyes! Oh.... the Kuiper Belt. Right... nope, haven't seen it. Then there's that third reason. A little known fact about the "Goldilocks Planet": it lives right next door to the mother of all black holes (I believe that's referred to as the "Three Bears Neutron Star"). Before we took off, we asked the Gliseans how best to navigate back in the direction of our home system. They gave us what was, for them, some pretty typical advise - go left, but not too far left; then take a right turn at the asteroid... not the BIG asteroid, not the LITTLE one, the JUST RIGHT one ... and so on. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) took all this down in his memory banks, then plugged himself into our spacecraft's navigational computer and passed the directions along. (It may have been my imagination, but he always seems to have a self-satisfied smi...

Okay, so the president has a bit to apologize for. He's not alone in that respect - plenty of blame to go around here. Fact is, the administration is certainly wrong to criticize the liberal-left for denouncing the deal he cut with Republicans this week. If the president was painted into a corner, it was not by the left. The Congress members who were dead set against raising the tax issue before this past election were "Blue Dog" conservatives, worried about offending their constituencies - the same voters that would soon send more than half of them packing. It is now these conservative Democrats that Obama is relying upon during the lame duck session to shepherd this deal through the House. It seems likely that most Republicans will support it, so he hardly needs the entire Democratic caucus. In any case, the capitulation happened a long time ago. At this point, the main thing is making certain that unemployed workers get the help they need. I don't care how we get t...

The gravity's not too strong, not too weak. The water is not too wet, not too dry. The inhabitants are not too short, not too tall.... MAN this place is ANNOYING! Yes, this is Big Green , reporting live from the Goldilocks Planet, recently discovered orbiting the star Gliese 581 - technical name is Gliese 581g, actually, one of six sibling planets (Did Goldilocks have siblings? Don't know. What an exasperatingly ill-defined folk tale!) After its recent discovery, we decided to make it a stop on our ENTER THE MIND: THE ULTIMATE BIG GREEN EXPERIENCE interstellar tour, but now I'm beginning to have some regrets. It's just to damned perfect down here. It's a planet of anal retentive mo-fo's (though they're not too obsessive about it ... which if anything is even more exasperating). Take our itinerary (please!). We showed up to the first gig about fifteen minutes late. You'd think we'd shot somebody. The Glieseans were running about with five of their six...

All right, here are a few wild passes at some current issues. Leaking the obvious. Now that there's a concerted effort by telecom corporations to shut down access to Wikileaks and a man hunt underway for Julian Assange, perhaps someone should stop and consider how asinine this vendetta truly is. It's the internet, for chrissake... if the documents get lifted, they will certainly be posted somewhere. And sure, the cables are embarrassing to diplomats, etc. But are any of the most publicized revelations in the latest Wikileaks document dump at all surprising? Consider... Iranian influence in Iraq. Well, there's a shocker. Iran has been spending money in Iraq, has relationships with many of its senior leaders. Is it possible that anyone would be surprised by this? Iraq is a majority Shi'a country, like Iran. There are longstanding cultural, religious, and political ties between these two neighboring states, and many Iraqi political figures took exile in Iran during the ...

Great... they're sending a radioactive microbot up my shirtsleeve. You think the TSA is tough? Try the customs line on The "Goldilocks" planet. I want to start this week's "usual rubbish" blog with a thank you to all of those who helped bail us out of the Kaztropharian jail. (You know who you are.) Not sure how everyone worked out how the bail-bond system works on Kaztropharius 137b - must have looked it up on the interwebs. (You have to put up at least three cases of cotton swabs per pound of body weight. It can get costly... so hey, thanks.) Well, as much as I like it on Kaztropharius , we left the moment they opened the cage door, overdue as we were for the next booking on our super-fantastic ENTER THE MIND: THE ULTIMATE BIG GREEN EXPERIENCE interstellar tour. A little place called.... The "Goldilocks" Planet. It was kind of a long passage, so we had some time to rehearse. Matt wanted to polish off some older material. We ran through a few n...

Couple of things to comment on this week. I'll be brief - it's a holiday, for chrissake. Unforced confession. George W. Bush has been hawking his memoir for the last couple of weeks, proudly admitting that he personally authorized the use of waterboarding - a torture technique he considers legal because his legal advisors told him so. "I'm not a lawyer," he told Matt Lauer in one interview. How far would that get any of us in front of a judge? No one seems particularly bothered about this, but Bush's proud admission, along with Cheney's, is basically a declaration that our justice system is in a shambles; that the law applies only to the powerless and that cruel and unusual punishment is acceptable. Torture is a violation of U.S. statute and of international conventions to which the U.S. is both a signatory and a primary participant. Waterboarding is torture; it has been recognized as such since the days of Torquemada and before, I'll wager. Bush and ...

Good evening, everybody... glad you could tune in. This is Joe of Big Green , and I'm joined here by my bandmate/brother Matt Perry, mad scientist Mitch Macaphee, and Marvin (my personal robot assistant). We're running this little web-a-thon to raise funds for our bail, frankly. That's why we're broadcasting from this cramped little cell in a Kaztropharian jail. Yes, yes... we landed back in the crowbar hotel here on Kaztropharius 137b thanks to the efforts of Mitch, here, who took it upon himself to start playing ducks and drakes with the planet's gravitational field. Long story short, it ended up more drakes than ducks, and a pound of flour on Kaztropharius 137b now clocks in at about five tons. At 37 drachmas a pound... well, you do the math. No one can afford the stuff. Bread factories are closing down. Bread riots have plagued the capital. And as the last pockets of resistance are vanquished, the emperor gazes ruefully down from his citadel and ponders the ...

Just a few short shots today. Hopefully one of them will approach some acceptable level of accuracy. Out of work / luck. The House failed to reach the 2/3 majority it needed this week to approve extending unemployment benefits to the millions out of work for an exceedingly long period of time - about 9.6 percent of us, if you count every part-time burger flipper as "employed" (and don't even count those unemployed but no longer looking for work). Once again, our great lawmakers are playing ducks and drakes with people's lives, blaming the victim, punishing those who have paid for their bad decisions. Got the number of your congressman/woman? Get on the phone to them and tell them to vote for this sucker, even if it adds to the freaking deficit. This is a question of survival for millions of American families - what's more important than that? Gitmo conviction. Justice Department prosecutors have won the case against a Gitmo detainee Ahmed Ghailani, but are losin...

There's a lot I could say at this juncture, Mitch. A whole lot... but I think I'll just hold my tongue. Don't want to spend time in a Kaztropharian jail if you don't have to. Oh, hi.... We've found our way to planet Kaztropharius 137b with both hands, as you might divine from that last bit of dialogue - the latest venue on our ENTER THE MIND: THE ULTIMATE BIG GREEN EXPERIENCE tour of the galaxy. How do you tour a whole galaxy exactly? Quite simple - just jump on the ship before we take off... next time. Right now we're deep in the middle of nowhere, anchored to a planet that seems to like our music (something in the air, I think, makes it sound better up here... perhaps a hallucinogenic quality). Kaztropharius 137b (I think I've got that spelling correct) is a solid little globe with a nickel core. Molten nickel, I'm told - I can't say for certain, since I've never been there, but it seems a reasonable assumption. Our first couple of performa...

The election is barely past us and corporate America is already knocking on our door for the rent. Speaking of timing, former Sen. Alan Simpson and former Clinton Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles, co-chairs of the president's commission on deficit reduction, have agreed we should gut Social Security, Medicare. Well, there's a surprise - both have an execrable history of animosity towards these quite successful social programs. (Simpson's contempt for elderly people is palpable and disgusting, and he never misses an opportunity to toss a rhetorical brick at them.) Of course, their proposal also calls for tax cuts for the rich and for corporations. Again, no surprises there. This is just the latest chapter in the attack against the poor, working class, elderly, and infirm that has been underway for decades in this country. Time and time again they have sought to undermine Social Security, to loot its trust fund, and to convert it into something it was never intended to be - an i...

We're off the charts? Finally! Took long enough. What the hell... this band has been going for 25 years and we... What? Oh. We're off the star charts. Right. Well, space travel has just gotten a lot more confusing, people. Much, much more complicated than even a few weeks ago when we left planet Earth to embark on this ENTER THE MIND: THE ULTIMATE BIG GREEN EXPERIENCE tour. It seems that normal (i.e. not mad) scientists back on Earth have discovered the existence of literally millions.... perhaps BILLIONS of Earth-sized planets circling stars throughout our galaxy. As we're bobbing around out here, trying to find our next destination ( Kaztropharius 137b ), we've been scratching our heads, trying to figure out where all of these freaking planets came from. None of them are on the charts. Lots of them look alike. This is bloody ridiculous. Okay, so... where do we start? With the mad scientist, of course. Mitch Macaphee knows everything about planets and planetoids, from...

Looks like we all drive with Boehner. And perhaps swim with Aqua Buddha. Okay, so... here's the irony of this mid-term election. Admittedly Obama isn't the most "outside of the box" thinker imaginable, but when he came into office two years ago, he had a relatively ambitious agenda that included a major stimulus package. The original version included infrastructure spending that would have put some fuel into this sluggish recovery. The Republicans had decided, of course, to vote no on everything, including cloture for all Senate bills, making the bar for passage of anything more than sixty votes. The stimulus got watered down with tax cuts - 30% or so was tax cuts - to bring along people like Arlen Specter, who was a Republican then. Of course, that spending package worked by all measures... but only so well, as tax cuts have always been a pretty poor method for stimulating the economy. The G.O.P. then tag the dems with the "failed stimulus", even though its...

No, no - that is Antares. This is Betelgeuse. And Kaztrofarius 137b is way over here, not here . Jesus christmas, Mitch! I thought you said you could read maps. Okay, well... that's great. Only the third leg of ENTER THE MIND 2010: THE ULTIMATE BIG GREEN EXPERIENCE - our current interstellar tour - and we're freaking lost like a bunch of rubes in blindfolds feeling their way around Manhattan. When? When will I stop listening to people when they tell me shit that isn't true? Mitch Macaphee, a man who can build robots, invent planet-busting snake oil, and repair an ion-drive engine with egg cartons and bailing wire, told me that he was an expert with star charts. Well, guess what. He exaggerated. Slightly. Just slightly. Like... not at all. How lost are we? Hard to tell. I asked Marvin (my personal robot assistant) what he thought, and he just blinked his lights on and off for a minute or two, said nothing. A deathly silence from this man of brass. Not a good sign when you...

Just a few thoughts prior to the most expensive mid-term elections in U.S. history. Don't abstain. You've heard this before from wiser people than me. You've even heard it from me . In any case, here it is again - don't stay home on election day. Go out and vote. Vote against the money tide from corporate America. Make their Supreme Court-sanctioned pay-to-play electoral machine useless to them. It only works if we cooperate by failing to oppose their favored candidates - don't. Get out there and mark those ballots - again, not because that's the only thing that needs to happen in order to build a better world, but because it's necessary to keep the media-fueled G.O.P. "tsunami" myth from materializing. I'm most particularly addressing this message to folks in states like Wisconsin, where you are represented by the finest member of the U.S. Senate. For god's sake, don't replace Feingold with some vacuous millionaire CEO. And for those ...

You can't lift that? Are you sure? Try again. Put your back into it. Some robot assistant you turned out to be! Can't even lift a freaking bottlecap. Okay, well, here we are on a virtually invisible "supermass" planet orbiting the red giant Antares. Hate to tell you what the fine is for littering on this rock. Something to do with being staked out while drunken cops take pot shots at you with flame throwers. (I think I've got that right.) Thing is, the gravity here is outrageous. I admit we've all put on a few (and when I say "all" I mean "me") since our salad days back in the '80s, but on Antares 3 we're all heavyweights. In fact, I weigh about seventeen tons here. (I'm talking metric tons, besides.) And when you drop something, it's like the sucker is welded to the ground. (Of course, in places, the ground is molten, so it might just BE welded to the ground.) I shouldn't blame Marvin (my personal robot assistant) for ...

Had a feeling it was going to be this bad, but honestly... I guess I didn't realize how bad "this bad" truly could be. The congressional district I live in (NY-24) is being completely flooded with ads paid for by both candidates and independent front groups. Watch five minutes of commercial television and you will see an unrelenting battle between these forces, in which the ads overwhelmingly spotlight the candidates they oppose. They've got the low, ominous music, the gravel-voice guy, the nasal, sarcastic-sounding lady, the uncomplimentary photos of Brand X candidate, all cloudy and grayscaled. Some are clearly national ads customized to fit the district; others home made. All are execrable. It would be no surprise to anyone who reads this blog that I have voted for (and even volunteered for) Michael Arcuri (D-NY) in the past. That is not because of any deep or enduring loyalty towards the candidate; again, I vote strategically. His election means one less vote for ...

The thing about sFshzenKlyrn ... If you dare him to do something, he's just liable to do it. Kind of a 14-year-old Earth kid in that way. Second leg of our interstellar tour is now underway, and we've already broken some records. I mean 45s and LPs - Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, insists on bringing his cache of vintage sides with him everywhere he goes. (He's an analog kind of guy.) That's where the dare comes in. You know how these deep space passages can be - lots of time on our hands, watching asteroids go by. A few hours pass in silence and you start looking for something to do. That's when anti-Lincoln dared sFshzenKlyrn to spin a record in mid air with his heat ray vision. Now, I know what you're going to say ... they are in Big Green's entourage, and therefore, their actions are our responsibility. Well... that only makes sense on Planet Earth, my friends. Whole different ball game out yonder. Well all right, so... whoever may ultimately...

Dear progressives and like-minded folks... set aside your various misgivings with respect to the Democratic party for the next few weeks. Just consider this: Point one: Not your daddy's GOP. As bad as this past two years have been, it could get much worse. And with the current crop of Republicans in charge of Congress, it most certainly will. Anyone with the memory of an ant can recall what the last G.O.P. congress was like. This next one would be far more destructive, as some of the moderating influences have been removed and the more radical elements brought to the fore. We will see Mike Pence, Darrell Issa, and Michele Bachmann in leadership positions. This will mean destructive legislation, impeachment proceedings, and god knows what else. Point two: Corporate cash. It likely has not escaped your attention that corporate interests - spearheaded by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce - are pouring money into this election like never before. Newly empowered by the Supreme Court's...

Cold fingers? Rub them together. I know we're in a trackless void with temperatures approaching absolute zero - just rub a little harder. Just coming off of a ripping good string of performances on Neptune, mother of all Big Green fans in the outer rings of our solar system. (Good to know we're still loved by someone... or some THING.) When I say "ripping good", I mean it certainly seemed that way to us. As some of you may know, however, the atmosphere on Neptune contains many elements not prevalent in our own sweet Earth-bound air, so frankly, after a couple of sets breathing that stuff, I get a little punchy. You could tell me iron is chocolate and I'd believe you. You could tell me Carl Paladino is sane, and I'd buy it. It's just that crazy. So... we may have played well, but possibly not. Or "splunge", as Monty Python would put it. Some of you may remember the distinctly terrestrial phenomenon we encountered on Neptune last time out of peopl...