Hammer Mill Days

Here. Squeeze your head into this helmet, see if it fits. What? No, I've never seen the movie Scarface . Not all the way through, anyway. Why? Mother of pearl. I'm surrounded by moaners. Nobody wants to wear a freaking space helmet, not even Marvin (my personal robot assistant). He's afraid of getting "helmet hair" of all things. (His so-called "hair" is made of leftover brass fittings from what appeared to be a Victorian era lawn mower.) I keep telling these people - if we're going to pile into that substandard missile Mitch Macaphee found for us and fly to distant solar systems, we will need at least minimal protective gear, to include a) a helmet, b) a bag of oxygen, c) some portable food, preferably sandwiches, d) THERE IS NO "D", e) boots, non hobnail variety, and f) a bunch of other stuff that you might need for space travel on the cheap. (Look it up on the Web.) Would that that were the worst of our problems. Fact is, Mitch...

Some storm, that Irene. Trouble is, it may - as so many recent catastrophic weather events have - turn out merely to be a taste of things to come. I can tell you, I've lived in the northeast for fifty years - that's 350 dog years, young 'uns! - and I have never seen anything like the flooding that has affected so much of northern and eastern New York. For chrissake, a street two blocks away from me was evacuated due to flooding... and we got just a very small piece of the storm. I shudder to think what might have happened to us if that storm had hit a bit further to the west. Here's the thing, though - this has been a disastrous year for weather pretty much everywhere. We've had tornados here in upstate New York. Multiple tornados. (My cousin saw three funnel clouds while out on the golf course that day.) Sure, we've gotten them before, but they were more like three in a decade, and not anything on a grand, midwestern scale. Just this morning, on NPR, the fi...