Hammer Mill Days

I hate it when I misplace things. Where the hell did I put that sucker? You don't suppose...? Oh, no. No, that's too awful to contemplate. I refuse to concede the possibility of such an unhappy happenstance. Oh, hi. Just spitballing here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. Nothing to get excited about. Between Big Green tours, as you may already know, we tend to blow a lot of time in contemplation and various other pointless activities. Not because we are perennial time-wasters, you understand. No, no - it's the ascetic lifestyle we aspire to. I know most bands drown themselves in drink, cloud their minds with illicit drugs, and indulge in multifarious pleasures of the flesh. Not this crew, my little friend - not a bit of it. We are like monks. (Did I say monks ? I meant monkeys . Or Monkees. You take your pick.) We sit about, scratch, toss things at one another... until somebody says, get up there and play. Funny thing is, when we play, it's actually quite a lot like...

Okay, I borrowed the title from Fountains of Wayne - quite like that song, actually. Here's what's on my tiny little mind this week... Japan is glowing. The story keeps shifting on the crippled nuclear reactor in Japan. One day there's a pressure problem in reactor 1, the next it's #3 that's spewing deadly isotopes. This feels a lot like the Deep Water Horizon catastrophe in that bland assurances are followed by new threats and, later, more bland assurances. The troubling part is that all six of these reactors have had problems - with both Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, it was a single reactor. Add to that the multiple caches of spent fuel rods, the presence of plutonium in reactor #3, and the evident contamination of food, water, and soil, and this is, as Colbert has said, a "Disas-Turducken". Of course, we have similar reactors here, ludicrously close to major population centers, whose operating permits are based on equally ludicrous 50-mile perimete...