Hammer Mill Days

Here's the fourth installment of our vaunted tour diary. Anybody got a pen? How about a knife? I can just whittle the words. A pen knife? Even better! Where have all the good tours gone? This one has gone a bit flat, though I will say that we did manage to get the rent-a-ship rolling again, thanks to sFshzenKlyrn . I know what you're thinking - he probably used some kind of trans-temporal presto-digitation to conjure us up a new ion drive servo chip. No such thing. He just waited until Marvin (my personal robot) was in sleep mode and plucked the chip out of his sorry hide. (Marvin lists a bit now. Not that that's a bad thing... I have him doing our set lists. Boom- crash .) Here's the lowdown on Big Green's [INSERT NAME HERE] Interstellar Tour 2011 : 10.31.2011 - Hallowe'en on Betelgeuse. Surprisingly, this is kind of a big deal up here. Not that they do the costumes or the trick or treat. In fact, it's kind of an interstellar anti-gravity day - the Betelge...

My brother Matt was complaining about NPR today. I guess they were talking to one of the fifty generals they have on tap; a guy named General Mills. ("What the hell, does he command Cap'n Crunch?" said Matt.) We groused about this a bit for the podcast . NPR and PBS have always been heavily freighted with retired generals, like the commercial networks and cable channels. But because they have been erroneously described as "leftist" or somehow associated with an elusive liberal elite, they go overboard to disabuse people of that notion. They fired Soundprint's Lisa Simeone for her association with Occupy DC, apparently fearing that her defense of the 99% would cloud her journalistic objectivity about opera, which is mostly what she covers. Call them National Paranoid Radio. I'm thinking about NPR particularly because of the president's declaration that the Iraq war will be drawn to a close at the end of this year, despite the administration's effo...