Hammer Mill Days

Don't tell me what day it is. No, really - I don't want to know. Just let me pretend that it's still Saturday. Yessss.... Saturday.... Oh, man. Typing in my sleep again. Someone should really take this laptop away from me. I'm liable to post ANYTHING while I'm sleeping, even (dare I say it?) the password to Marvin (my personal robot assistant). That's all you would need to make him do YOUR bidding, however inaccurately. Actually, (*yawn*) his password is a vegetable that starts with "P" followed by the fifth number up from zero. Do your worst. Don't forget to oil him regularly, and if he asks you to feed him, just ignore it. He fancies himself some kind of humanoid or cyborg, but that's pretty far from the truth. For chrissake, Mitch Macaphee made him out of bits and spares. Nothing of value in ... HEY! STOP KICKING ME, MARVIN! THAT HURTS!! Word to the wise - he gets kind of ornery sometimes. Or at least since we sent him down that enormous rab...

The price of oil is going up. Way up. In fact, it looks like it's going to cost us the whole Gulf Coast. Don't know if you heard this story on NPR , but apparently the oil volcano (as Rachel Maddow has been calling it) in the Gulf may be spewing ten times as much crude as BP has been estimating. That's up to 70,000 barrels a day, according to this analysis. With all the finger-pointing going on between the various overfed corporations involved in engineering this catastrophe, I guess there just hasn't been enough opportunity to calculate exactly how much toxic sludge is pumped into this vast body of water upon which millions of people - and countless animals - depend. This is almost beyond comment, and it happened before the echo died on Obama's announcement that he would be opening more offshore areas to oil exploration. As great as that sounded at the time, it's getting better and better by the day. These companies are falling all over themselves trying to lim...