Hammer Mill Days

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 ...