Hammer Mill Days

Going to have to transpose that one as well. Try it in B-flat. That's right, B-flat. No, no... not THAT B-flat, the one that's between A and B. Jesus. Oh, hi, reader. (I think you're out there, somewhere). Just reharmonizing a thing or two before Big Green gets underway with their upcoming interstellar tour 2010 (theme not yet announced). Matter of no small necessity, actually, as I just blew out a key on my Roland A-90ex - the A below middle C, as it happens. I think it died of overuse. (We seem to play a lot in A and A minor.) But, frugal as we are, rather than replace the sucker, I've been working around it. Hey... we've got to keep our tinder dry for this tour, man. Wouldn't want to be halfway out to Aldebaran without a spare dime in our pockets, now would we? ( Would we? Could be a question for Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, who is an unaffiliated expert on interstellar economics. I myself cannot be certain. A dime COULD be worth a FORTUNE in sp...

This whole business about Shirley Sherrod, the Agriculture Department staffer from Georgia - this is an extremely ugly picture, and we've seen it before. What's more, we're likely to see it again before long. There's been enough commentary on this to fill a supertanker, so I'll just make a few brief observations. What this event tells me most superficially is something I already knew - that the Obama administration is unbelievably pusillanimous. Christ almighty, sometimes these guys make Bill Clinton seem like Hercules (... and he wasn't). They may be the only people outside of hard-core tea party types that appear to believe everything they hear on Fox news. More likely, though, they are so focused on projecting this image of post-racial America that they respond in knee-jerk fashion to any claim of reverse racism, no matter how unfounded. Combine that with their tendency to throw left-leaning staffers, like Van Jones, overboard at the first sign of trouble (u...