Hammer Mill Days

No, no. Good monster. You don't want to kill your benefactor, do you? Here ... have some more porridge, there's a good chap. (Hoo boy.) Oh, hi. Yep, that's right; I'm in the process of talking down one of Mitch Macaphee's greatest creations (at least in his own estimation). Yes, it seems that Freakenstein, once set loose by Dr. Macaphee, did a tear around the neighborhood, pulling up lamp posts, opening fire hydrants, and generally making a nuisance of himself. He went into the local pawn shop and got a few items out of hock - items he, of course, had no personal connection with (since he was only just invented and has never known the joys of personal property) but nonetheless liked anyway. What did he use for money? No cash needed ... when you're Freakenstein. Okay, so ... predictably, the complaints start rolling in from all over town. And it's clear that we need to do something about this. It was a bit like when Big Zamboola first got here and started...

This is going to be brief. My back is a disaster area today, and that's no Jonathan Harris imitation. I was listening to President Obama speaking at the NATO summit this past week, talking about ending the Afghan War "responsibly". And I had this impulse to say, "Thanks, Nixon!" Back in the day, old Dick was winding down his war, so to speak, standing up a colonial army (the ARVN - south Vietnamese army) and always talking about "peace with honor" after nearly a decade of mindless slaughter. They were fighting "terrorists" as well - just look at Life magazine or some other news publication from the late 1960s and you'll see that that was one of the terms they used to describe the Viet Cong (NLF). Not so different. Except that it was actually more brutal, as brutal and ugly as the Afghan war has been and continues to be. Vietnam and more generally Indochina was almost totally destroyed during the American war there, particularly from ...