Hammer Mill Days

Looks good, Mitch. Can you make it move forward a little bit? You know... just roll a little towards that crater-like object. That's a crater? No lie? Hmmm.... Oh, hello. Just watching the Curiosity rover on Mars. No, we're not glued to the NASA web site staring at the same low rez images everyone else is poring over. God, no. When you have friends in the world of science, that gets you access, my good fellow. Big Green , of course, has an official mad science advisor in the form of Mitch Macaphee, inventor of Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and thrice honored diplomate of the international college of lunatic physicists. When he heard about this Mars rover at a recent loony conference, he built himself a little home made telemetry device that allows him to ... well ... take command of the Mars rover. ("Oh, no you didn't!" we said. But oh, yes he did. ) This telemetry thing isn't about science, though. Don't say it's about science. It's abo...

I suppose if I'm going to rant about anything this week, it's going to be the election. Election years are always nerve-wracking, like a slow-motion train wreck. They make me feel, more than ever, that we as a nation are sleep-walking into history. The notion that we can be on the knife-edge of electing someone like Mitt Romney president - that working people of any persuasion (to say nothing of retirees) would ever consider voting for that overpaid fichus tree in a suit - is simply flabbergasting. To be certain, Obama has not acted boldly enough on the economy, on basic issues of human rights, and so on. That's a given. But let us not forget how we got into this hole in the first place. We had eight years of Dubya Bush, during which time he and his fellow cartoon pirates started two wars, established torture as an open instrument of foreign policy, blew an enormous hole in the federal budget with two rounds of wartime tax cuts, let New Orleans be destroyed, crashed the e...