Hammer Mill Days

That thing you just said five minutes ago. Say it again. No, not that - the OTHER thing you said. The thing that wasn't some dumb-ass comment. Whoa... calm down, Hemingway! Sensitive artists, these rock musicians. Well, let me qualify that. I'm actually referring to the individuals, human and non-human, who hang around with rock musicians. I'm talking about your man-sized tuber, your Marvin (my personal robot assistant), your Mitch Macaphee, your Lincoln and anti-Lincoln, etc. We of Big Green proper (brother Matt, brother-in-law John, and I) have asked these hangers-on for suggestions on where we should take the next interstellar tour. Of course, this is a bit like placing 100 monkeys at 100 typewriters and hoping for Hamlet to pop out of one of the carriages. Still, you do get lucky from time to time, and just today - I swear - one of them made a suggestion that made sense. Actual sense, in a wholly non-ironic way. What am I babbling about? I'll get to it, I'll g...

Back to short takes. (Did somebody say shortcake?) Credibility gulf. If BP is to be taken at its word, oil is no longer spewing into the Gulf of Mexico by the millions of gallons. The only thing spewing right now, it seems, is the torrent of P.R. from the company responsible, as well as a copious amount of whining from the industry. The echoes of this have even my local Congressional district. Now, I've had my complaints about our Congressman, Mike Arcuri, and some of the positions he's taken. But just a look at his G.O.P. opponent is enough to disabuse me of any notion of sitting on my hands this November. Arcuri's rival, Richard Hanna, was criticizing Arcuri for supporting Obama's flaccid 6-month ban on deepwater drilling, saying the oil exploration companies will pull out and go somewhere else. This basically parrots the line from the Petroleum Institute, whose spokescreep I heard on NPR this morning. Think about it for half a second. When we open leasing on all tha...