Hammer Mill Days

Great red what ? Jesus christmas, I don't have time for that. I'm trying to stay focused on the Mars mission. Then there's Voyager, all alone out there at the edge of the solar system already... whoops. Someone's reading this. Look busy! Hi, friend(s). You may wonder what I'm rambling about. Though probably not, if you've visited this blog before. We run on and on about pretty much anything that flows into our heads. Hell, I was looking at a pizza menu the other day that featured deep-fried Oreos. But does anyone want to hear about it? God no. So we're going to talk about something more interesting today .... like Jupiter. (The planet, not the derivative Roman god.) The other day some massive asteroid supposedly hit Jupiter. I say "supposedly" because, to be perfectly frank, I think this incident is actually the work of our mad science advisor, Mitchington V. S. Macaphee III, M.S.D., C.M.F. (For the curious, his honorifics are short for Doctor ...

Anniversaries of 9/11 come and go, it seems, and like most days of remembrance they are not all that memorable in themselves. This past Tuesday (I believe the event actually occurred on a Tuesday, if memory serves) I was up at Syracuse University, walking past a sidewalk medium that held a field of mini-flags, one for each of the victims of the terrorist attacks. A large sign at one end admonished us to "Never Forget." Not a very unusual experience on such an anniversary. I'm sure there are fields of flags all across the country at this time of year. Walking past it, though, it seemed like there were so few of them. They were arranged in a big rectangle, with a large space in the middle, and it looked kind of sparse. Is this what more than 3,000 flags looks like? I think the reason it looked so empty was that there were no flags to represent the hundreds of thousands that have died since that day, and in large part because of that day. The cautionary "Never Forget...