Hammer Mill Days

Did you hear that just then? No? Listen closely. How about now? Still nothing, eh? No worries. It's just the sound of the holidays receding into the distance. Hello, everyone. Glad to see you survived whatever holiday saturnalia has possessed you for the past two weeks. We have arrived at the other side, and good thing, too. Plenty to do, and not a lot of time to do it in. Here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, Big Green has gotten a head start on the new year (as is typical for us). We had an ambitious January 1st morning, hauling our sorry asses out of bed at the crack of noon, jugging empty bottles for half an hour, then collapsing back onto the mattress for another five. We did even more on Wednesday. Okay, so that's not such a fast start in this day and age. There was a time, my young friend, when such an effort might have been considered proactive. Nevertheless, there is work to be done on our upcoming album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick . Matt and I did ...

Fiscal cliff averted, sort of. Glad we got through that manufactured crisis. Now ... on to the next one. I suppose I shouldn't be surprised when politicians set up straw men to knock over. The so-called "fiscal cliff" is certainly one. Deficits only seem to matter when there's a Democrat in the White House; otherwise, they are practically unmentionable. When we went from surplus to $400 billion deficits during the reign of W. Bush - who famously started two wars with one hand while cutting taxes with the other - the G.O.P. was silent on the debt. Come January 21, 2009, it was a crisis again. Saints preserve us. Mind you, the deficit did balloon to more than a trillion dollars at the end of 2008, when the economy took a nosedive, the financial system began to collapse, and more than 700,000 workers were being dropped every month (i.e. Bush's economic policies finally kicking in big time). The two things are not unrelated. Our current deficits are principally the ...