Hammer Mill Days

Call out the marines. Get the cops down here. Somebody plugged our money hole... and this could be a problem. Yeah, I know ... all good things come to an end, right? We were just starting to get traction as the next big-box store. Our theme is that of an abandoned mill... all of our stores look like abandoned mills. (Note: we only have one store, and it's in an abandoned mill.) We have a mascot, Marvin (my personal robot assistant), and a jokey spokes vegetable, the mansized tuber, who we were thinking would wheel his way through quirky television commercials, speaking in a British... no, Aussie accent. Perhaps German accent. We haven't worked out that part yet. He would show up in board rooms and on cruise ships ... at least the ones that don't tip over or catch on fire. And hell, with the help of our marketing advisor, Noname, on loan from the A and R representative at our corporate label, Loathsome Prick Records, we even had an expansion plan on the board, with a big map...

The first question I asked myself when I heard about the Koran burning incident in Afghanistan was, how could anyone make this mistake? What were the circumstances of the burning? For chrissake, everyone knows what the consequences of such an act are likely to be. When that crackpot preacher in Florida was ostentatiously threatening to burn the Muslim holy book, diplomats, generals, political leaders, clergy ... people all across the country and around the world were applying pressure on him not to do this. It is deeply inflammatory - this is widely known. My second thought was, this is not simply about burning Korans. This incident followed ten years of war and all the evils that are contained within that fact. It occurred during a stretch of weeks in which we saw cell-phone video of American soldiers laughing and joking as they pissed on the corpses of Afghans; our military personnel adopting an SS-type insignia for one of their units; our Defense Department persisting in its robotic...