Hammer Mill Days

Better take this slow, Mitch. Those suckers look sharp, real sharp. Sharp as a ... a very sharp thing. Got a thesaurus? No, it's not a creature from the Cretaceous. It's a book with.... oh never mind. Well here we are, on the first leg (or arm, perhaps) of Big Green's much anticipated (by us) [INSERT NAME HERE] Interstellar Tour 2011 - an aimless romp through the chewy center of the galaxy and from one end of our voluminous songbook to the other. Oh yes, we're going from A to Z on this one. That was something we settled on in the rehearsal cellar, mainly because we couldn't decide what the hell to play. So Matt pulls out this massive loose-leaf tome of songs from hell, arranged alphabetically, and we started paging through. From All Saints Come to You're Dripping ... it's a veritable cornucopian magnum opus of Big Green numbers from back in the day. Our set lists are the stuff of nightmares, frankly. (And who's this Frank Lee you keep speaking of?) ...

The Pew Research Center released a study this week examining attitudes about the ongoing wars, one of which is celebrating a grim little birthday this week. The war in Afghanistan is turning ten, and showing no signs of letting up. Yet the study shows that maybe a third of the American public is actually following the wars. For most people, it's like a reality show that has lost its luster; there is really no more profound an investment in the enterprise than that. This is, some have pointed out, the longest continuous conflict the U.S. has ever been involved in, and certainly (I suspect) the most serious war "we've" ever fought that didn't involve some kind of conscription. Less than one percent of Americans have fought in these wars, and none of them have paid any higher taxes to underwrite them. It's hard to imagine how a war this difficult to justify could last a decade or more on the backs of anything other than an all-volunteer force. If there'd been...