Hammer Mill Days

Just settling in here. Man, but it's good to be back home! If by home, you mean ... something a little more congenial than this dank, drippy, drafty old mill. It is winter in the northeast, after all. (This just in.) And Big Green , being made up of at least 40% sentient life forms, 35% mammalians, tends to be a tad sensitive to the extreme cold. We experience this on our space voyages, of course. Deadly cold in outer space! Just go there and see for yourself. (Bring a jacket... and some oxygen.) It's a real problem for our friends and spokesvegetable, the mansized tuber, whose sap has a decidedly higher freezing point than our own human blood. That means he needs to stay close to the fire... but not TOO close. It's a delicate balance for tubey, let me tell you. So, yeah, it's snowing, soon as we get here, and the freaking place is cold as a polar bear's ass. Basically we're confining ourselves to indoor activities. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is on the

There's a lot going on these days, but I'll confine my meandering comments to a couple of topics. Tucson shooting. Much has been said and written about this horrible event over the past week. There are one or two things that have stuck in my mind. The first is that weapon - a glock with a 30-round clip. Why the hell are these weapons available for purchase? Where did he get the gun, the ammo? And how many shootings like this will it take to put some reasonable control on such out-of-control firepower? Every time this kind of thing happens, we hear the bleating, "Our thoughts are with the victims of this senseless crime," blah-blah-blah. And yet we do nothing. I thing it's time for Chris Rock's $5,000 bullets. (Adjusted for inflation, that's probably $7,500 per round.) The other thing is the discourse question. There's no question but that over-the-top rhetoric inspires violent acts; whether this is one of them, no one has been able to say. It just see