Hammer Mill Days

Anybody got a plumb line? You know - a weight on a string? Come on, people - let's get resourceful here. Jeezus. How about a tape measure with an eggplant tied to the end? Oh, hi out there in TV land. Just attempting to plumb the depths of what has become a rather large rend in the garment of our adoptive home, the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill here in upstate New York. We're just getting a preliminary read here, but I'd say this sucker goes down pretty far. Maybe to the center of the Earth (or, to use the term New York-based geoscientists commonly employ, the "oit"). In fact, I have some pretty good evidence that this crack goes straight through the nougat to the chewy center of our lively little planet. What evidence, you ask? The first-hand kind... as in robot hand... as in Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who volunteered to, well, dive down there and take a look. Now, when I say he volunteered, I mean so in the technical sense. In other words, I called in ...

News organizations, film-makers, and journalists in general have a maddening tendency to personalize everything and render the most complex issues into extended personal anecdotes. It's a method for storytelling tried and true, and it's obviously one that generates sales since it is so prevalent in the mainstream media. This sometimes manifests itself in the form of stories that focus on a reporter's experience rather than whatever that reporter is witnessing. (Gary Trudeau has offered an extreme example of this with his journalist character Roland Hedley and his perpetually inane Twitter feed.) There's also the phenomenon of framing complex historical events as being largely the product of one person's efforts. Probably the best example of this would be Reagan purportedly bringing down the Berlin Wall through the awesome power of speech. And there's "Charlie Wilson's War", the namesake of which - former Texas representative Charlie Wilson - just p...