Hammer Mill Days

Hand me that bottle, will you, Marvin? That's right - the one with the brownish-green liquid in it. I think it's spiked with marzipan or something. That's about as hard as it gets on this miserable pimple of a planet. Jesus Christmas. Oh, hi, friend of Big Green . Well, here we are on Aldebaran Five, soaking up the radiation, drinking gloog, making slemoth, and generally doing what living beings do on Aldebaran Five, at least when they're in between performances. As you might have surmised from our previous posts, we were hideously late for the one-week run we had booked on A-5, so we had to shuffle things around a bit. Actually, we canceled a gig on Sirius (the star system, not the satellite radio network). Can't think it bothers them much. They never take anything .... serious .... lee. My apologies. Anyway, how is it going here on A-5? Not too shabby. Our current album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick has sold relatively well here. Fact is, we would be...

We are approaching the grim milestone of twenty years after the passage of NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement - a pact that is described even by bland media outlets like NPR as having benefited only corporations in the 3 countries affected. Twenty years after its passage and signing by President Clinton, the evidence is in and it seems clear that many if not all of the criticisms were justified. And now that it is well-established and that we have entered into numerous other trade deals modeled on NAFTA, mainstream news organizations can report the obvious, namely: NAFTA has fueled immigration to the U.S. from Mexico. By forcing Mexican corn farmers, for instance, to compete with Cargill, the agreement effectively destroyed large segments of rural livelihood in Mexico, sending economic refugees streaming into their cities and ultimately across the U.S. border in a desperate bid to find gainful employment. (I might add that, coupled with the high demand from the U.S. for ...

Ahem . Still bobbing out here in deep space. Nothing to keep us company but the echoes of our increasingly impatient throat clearings. Ahem! Well, while we have so much time on our hands, time to crack open that big Christmas present we left all of you who subscribe to our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN - namely, our annual Christmas Spectacular. What's inside the box this year? Two solid hours of Big Green madness, including: Ned Trek XV: Santorum’s Christmas Planet - This special, expanded holiday edition of our (un)popular Star Trek parody features six - yes, six - new Big Green songs, sung in character: Christmas Shine - Captain Mitt Romney's joyful rumination on getting full value out of his human resources throughout the holiday season. And he's not going to say it again. Horrible People - Mr. Ned contemplates the fate of all animals during the dangerous Yultide ritual celebrations. (Backing vocals by those '40s guys.) Dick'smas Xmas - Even the robot ...

Just a few things I want to comment on this week, not at any great length. Bear with me, please. Human Rights. In what appeared to be an effort to elicit Vietnam's cooperation in the looming Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) "free trade agreement" - really an investors' rights agreement - Secretary of State John Kerry recently paid a visit to Hanoi to discuss new maritime security cooperation measures, against the backdrop of China's recent declaration of a kind of demilitarized zone in the South China Sea. None of this is surprising, but what kind of made my jaw hang open was the reporting around the visit. The main hook was that Kerry had been part of America's expeditionary force in South Vietnam during the war, and he toured some of his old haunts in the south. NPR (not to single them out - everyone else did this, too), practically in a single breath, made reference to this trip down memory lane, then referred to problems with Vietnam's human rights r...

That looks like Rigel over there. And Arcturus. And Canopus. No, wait. That's Canoli, a most unusual deep space object. Instead of a molten nickel core, it's filled with almond paste. And that dusting of what looks like dry ice? Powdered sugar. Oh, hi. Just getting our bearings here out in deepest, darkest space. Kind of hard to do without a map - yes, I'm looking at you , Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who left the map case under his workbench back home. Right, so ... chartless, clueless, and nearly devoid of rocket propellant, Big Green is meandering its way to the first stop on our interstellar tour in support of Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick , which is charting in the Crab Nebula this month, I hear. (Yes, I read the trades.) How did we get into this pickle, this sitch, this hot water, this plate of spinach? Well ... it all started when we hitched a ride on the charred remnants of the comet ISON as it made its way out of the solar system. It's kind...

There are few things in life more certain than eventual bipartisan agreement on screwing large swaths of our fellow citizens. While I'm glad there won't be a repeat of the government shutdown / debt ceiling self-immolation ritual, this pattern of gradually ratcheting up the austerity gets very tiresome after two or three cycles. This time, the unemployed get thrown under the bus. What a great way to save money - take food out of the mouths of people who have been down on their luck for more than a year. Freaking 7% unemployment and they're acting like the jobless are just plain lazy. That's a truly criminal level of ignorance on the part of elected officials. One thing, though. Let's dispense with this notion that the Republicans are somehow against raising taxes. This has been thoroughly debunked since the House went red three years ago. Even before they took office, they killed the "Making Work Pay" tax credit, costing families like mine another $800 ...

Okay, well, THAT didn't go so well, did it? Right. Don't panic. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three … arrrrrgghhh. It's been a couple of weeks, so I don't know if you recall our harebrained plan to get to the various extraterrestrial venues in our interstellar tour to support Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick (selling quite briskly on Aldebaran, I hear). Right, well… we have that rent-a-wreck rocket (or "wreck-it") that will get us part of the way to Aldebaran and points west-southwest, but it doesn't quite have the horsepower to escape our solar system. If we tried, at this time of year, we would get caught in the gravitational pull of the sun. Then the only pleasure we'd get out of this trip would be to watch Smith fry… Okay, I've wandered a bit. Fact is, the only solution we could think up in the absence of our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee is to launch ourselves into extended orbit around the Earth and hitch a ride on the come...

Nelson Mandela is dead, as I'm sure you've heard. Now we need to save his memory from the fate suffered by the leaders of our own freedom movements. We have to keep the loud and the powerful from turning him into a posthumous Santa Claus, as they have attempted to do, with some success, in the case of Martin King, Rosa Parks, and others. King has been reduced to "I have a dream...", that terminal ellipsis containing practically all that he was - a brilliantly thoughtful man at the front of a mass movement made up of very brave, very thoughtful people, many of whose names we will never know, who brought America back from its own version of apartheid. The same process has already begun with Mandela. The movement he led is practically invisible to the American public mind. We have a tendency to focus on individuals, and in so doing, we make even those individuals seem two-dimensional, statue-like in their inscrutable virtue. The long walk to freedom begins to take on t...

Hello, all. Just taking a moment out from our interstellar tour saga to remember an old friend and one-time band-mate who died unexpectedly this past week. I will no doubt return to the utter nonsense that is this blog's usual narrative, but right now I can't quite bring myself to do it. Just need some time for reflection, I guess. Tim Walsh played guitar with a band my brother and I started back in the seventies - a precursor to Big Green in many ways. We had about seventeen names for the group, none of which stuck. (It was a bit like Jethro Tull's early days when they played the same clubs over and over under different names - kind of a good strategy, that.) Tim was my sister's boyfriend at the time; a slightly older (at that point in life, three years made a big difference) kid from Florida who had hair down to his ass, a blackbelt in Tai Kwan Do, and a 1959 black beauty Les Paul Custom. I was young enough to look up to him in those first days. Later on, we were...

I think that's the last of it. Packed tight, top to bottom. Nice job, lads. Okay ... pop the nose cone back on. Time to light this candle! Oh, howdy. Yup, we're getting ready to embark on our upcoming interstellar tour in support of our album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick , which as been a absolute drug on the market down here on earth, but is selling much more briskly in outer spaaaaaaaaaace. Seems like extraterrestrials are totally ready for satirical country-western, mock-pop, found sound records like ours. Who knew? Now if they only adopted some kind of currency that is convertible into our own. Right now they're paying us in photons. No, really. Every month, we get a box full of light in lieu of a royalty check. Try taking that to Chase Bank. I can't even get mortgage backed securities in exchange for that stuff. Still, it's worth something on Aldebaran, and that's all that counts ... if you live on Aldebaran. (We usually resort to doing all ...

One more shot at this Affordable Care Act issue, and then I'll shut up about it for a while. It irritates the hell out of me, to be honest, that I have to defend this product of a conservative think tank, but that's the crossroad we find ourselves at. Just a few points: People losing health insurance. This is a shocker, but people have always been booted out of their health plans. This is nothing new. Sure, Obama didn't qualify his claim that people could stick with their policies if they liked them. But the media's claim that this amounts to the President's "Katrina moment" is simply ludicrous. All of the examples of people who have been forced off of their substandard plans have involved people who can generally afford better. One brought forward by NBC was a freaking attorney in Washington. Come on! People never getting health insurance. While the G.O.P. and the entire mainstream media have had their hair on fire about the attorney lady who lost ...

Just getting a few things packed away in my cozy little cabin, in the makeshift rent-a-spacecraft we've hired for our interstellar tour in support of Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick (our latest album). A few sticks of chewing gum, some duct tape, an x-ray of a tooth (not mine, as it happens - just some random tooth) ... all stuff I wouldn't want to be without for the stretch of weeks we'll spend in the icy void of space. Brrrrr! Anyhow, before I do another hand's turn of real work, I wanted to post my usual visitor's guide to our most recent podcast. I know, I know - podcasts should explain themselves, right? Well, in a perfect world they would, but this world is far from perfect. Just ask Dr. Pangloss. (Wait ... he's probably exactly the person you shouldn 't ask. Try Candide instead.) November's THIS IS BIG GREEN included some very useful tidbits, such as: Ned Trek XIV: The Wrath of Carl - Amazing to hear myself say this, but this fourt...

Back when I was knee high to an antelope, in the scented 1960s, the U.S. was engaged in what is now described as "limited war" in Vietnam. Our concept of limitation is, well, somewhat limited, as it amounted to an all-out attack on Vietnamese society, particularly in the South Vietnam hinterlands, which took the brunt of the bombing, defoliation, and other depredations. Part of that policy was establishment of "Free-fire zones" - when night fell and the friendlies were inside the wire of the strategic hamlet, anything that moved beyond the wire was fair game. Hence the shooting, the bombing, etc. Our drone war in Pakistan-Afghanistan, and essentially everywhere else, runs on a similar principle. It isn't as all-out, of course, but it appears to be nearly as random. And just as every living thing in the Vietnamese countryside was assumed to be Viet Cong, every military age male in the tribal areas of Pakistan is, by definition, an extremist, a combatant, a terr...

I don't know. Do we really need a hibachi? We're all vegetarians, except for Marvin, who only eats electricity and petroleum distillates. Well... okay, then. Hi, friend of Big Green. What are they doing now? It's called getting ready for an interstellar tour, as yet unnamed, to support extraterrestrial sales of our most recent album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick . It took us long enough, but we did secure adequate transport for the seemingly impossible journey ahead of us. (Carl Sagan would say it is simply impossible, but he is not available to comment. Ergo ... it's possible.) Some over-the-road hauler dragged the missile here from the Moon, where its (asshole) owner left it for our retrieval. Jesus H. Christ, the company brought the craft all the way from Neptune, but apparently thought the moon was close enough. The accommodations on board, mind you, are a tad spare. Spartan, you might say. Ever read a book by one of the original NASA astronauts? Yeah, ...

The airwaves are thick with heated commentary on how President Obama overstated the simplicity of his signature health insurance legislation, popularly known as Obamacare. "If you like your health care plan, you can keep it," was how the refrain went throughout his first term. It was an unqualified statement and, indeed, an emotionally potent oversimplification of the type we see in political rhetoric, I don't know ... how about all the time ? Right, so, he lied in the sense that what he said was not accurate for 100% of the people who have health insurance, 100% of the time. It is, however, accurate for about 95% of the people 100% of the time, and for the other 5%, only some of the time. If you have a super crappy individual health insurance plan with an enormous deductible and you signed onto it before implementation of the Affordable Care Act, sure, you can keep that dog - it's grandfathered in. The insurance companies simply can't continue selling those pol...

Okay, I think we have this thing settled. Everyone in agreement? No? Good. We value diversity of perspective here at Big Green. Especially when LIVES HANG IN THE BALANCE.... Sorry, friends. I hate to raise my voice, but sometimes you just have to. With sketchy-looking promoters breathing down our necks (and judging by the aroma, they had limburger hoagies for lunch), we are still hashing out the details of our means of transport on our rapidly approaching interstellar tour in support of Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick , our latest album. We have, in fact, identified a rent-a-wreck spacecraft that is within our budget. It's being offered by a subsidiary of our corporate label, Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, Inc., operating on the planet Neptune. Fortunately, they deliver. (But only as far as the moon. I guess that extra 239,000 miles is a bridge too far for these goons.) Okay, my thought was this. We program Marvin (my personal assistant) with the ability to fly the craf...

This will be brief. I'm in the middle of a take-home mid term in Semantics. (Still a student at 54; Christ on a freaking bike.) Anyway... Today is the day that extended SNAP (food stamp) benefits expire. Happy Halloween, everybody! SNAP was allocated some additional money in the stimulus package, way back in early 2009, when it almost seemed possible that our national government would do what needed to be done to rescue the economy. The assumption back then was that the economy would be generating enough prosperity by this time that SNAP benefits wouldn't be needed. Obama's chief economic adviser at the time - a certain Dr. Pangloss, I believe - was certain Congress and the president would remain committed to putting people back to work. Then, of course, the Austerians came to power in 2011 and set us on the righteous path of Japan in the 1990s - the path we are crawling along today on our bloody hands and knees. Millions are still out of work, millions more under-emplo...

Ever see that episode of Lost In Space when they're rushing to get the piece-of-shit Jupiter 2 spaceworthy before the planet they've been living on for an entire television season explodes beneath them? Yeah, well ... that's sort of where Big Green is right now. No, a stereotypical t.v. gold miner named Mister Nerim is not fracking the Cosmonium out of the living rock beneath us (at least, not yet), but it's nearly as bad. Our corporate label, Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, Inc. (also known as Hegephonic) has arranged for an interstellar tour to support the release of our most recent album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick , which - while it hasn't done squat down here on earth - is selling briskly on Aldebaran, I hear. (Great music always finds its audience. And, well, ours does, too, if it travels far enough.) Of course, Hegemonic subcontracted the tour arrangements to some underworld figures, as they typically do. That has its upsides, like ... I do...

So the government's Affordable Care Act web site doesn't work. Does that surprise anyone? It's a big, honking, outsourced engineering project that has had the budget axe swinging over it for the past three years. It's been under constant threat of being defunded or declared unconstitutional, subjected to incessant political attack in Washington and around the country by a party dedicated to disabling it anyway that they can. The fact is, the most dysfunctional part of the Affordable Care Act is Medicaid expansion, not because it doesn't work but because half of the states in the union have refused to participate, even with 100% funding from the federal government. We hear so much about the Web site being a piece of shit (and rightfully so), and yet I don't see anyone on the right wringing their hands over the fact that something like 7 million people, the vast majority of whom are working poor, will have no access to health coverage simply because the governor...

Connect blue wire (A) to terminal (3). Check. Connect yellow wire (F) to terminal (48c). Check. Hit boot switch, but first, insert index fingers (K) and (M) into ears (7) and (8). Hmmm.... okay. Oh, hi. Caught me in the middle of something, as usual. Always some task to perform here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted squat-house in lovely upstate New York. As you may recall from previous posts (or not), we are preparing for an upcoming interstellar tour to support extraterrestrial sales of our new album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick . Fact is, we make most of our money on units sold outside the bounds of the known solar system. (The rest we make on Neptune and some of the smaller, rockier moons of Saturn.) Anyhow, as you might suspect, we will be needing some means of transportation for ourselves, our hangers-on, our instruments and gear, our provisions, etc. We have an old 1954 GMC City Coach (or we at least have access to it in the junk yard across the stre...

Well, so that's it, then. You captured one of us, threatened all of us... All right, I couldn't resist channelling Captain Pike for a moment, even if it does make for a non-sequitur type of opening. Still, there's something in the tone of that speech that reflects how I feel about this government shutdown / debt ceiling revolt by the stark minority of hayseeds known as the tea party. Sure, I'm relieved that they didn't upend the global capitalist system they profess to adore so much. And yes, I am heartened by news that hungry poor folks will be getting food assistance, and sick children will get treatment, and veterans will get aid, etc. That's all important. But relief shouldn't blind us to the rank selfishness that caused those people to lose their badly needed benefits. The fact is, the minority of House Republicans that make up the "tea party" caucus, led by their Senate mentor Ted Cruz, caused about $20-25 billion in losses to the U.S. ec...

Is this the new itinerary? Looks like last week's. Which, if I recall correctly, was a hastily updated photocopy of the flight path for Voyager 2. That mission didn't end well, my fine friend, just you remember. Yes, yes ... we are still preparing the ground for our upcoming interstellar tour to support celestial sales of Big Green's latest album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick . The itinerary thus far includes stops on gas giants, molten moons, and frozen asteroids hurtling into black holes. Couple of snags, that's all. Nothing to get excited about. (Man Jack Jesus, this band has to work like an animal to find an audience.) In the meantime, we have plucked the lost September episode of our podcast THIS IS BIG GREEN from the jaws of non-existence (if such a state of being can be said to have anything resembling jaws), and good thing, too: we needed an October episode very badly indeed. What's it all about? Well, you could give it a listen. Or you could j...

In the midst of chaos in Washington, it took more than a week of government shutdown for me to find something to be grateful to the Republicans for. It's a short list, but not an insignificant one. 1) Keeping Obama from attending the TPP negotiations . Because of the continuing resolution and debt ceiling disputes, the president opted not to go to the APAC summit in Bali to join in advancing negotiations on the Trans Pacific Partnership, a "trade agreement" he has been promoting as a great opportunity for the U.S. economy. I put "trade agreement" in quotes because, as always, these pacts are not so much about trade as about investor's rights. Like the Multilateral Agreement on Investments (MAI), NAFTA, and other similar instruments, the TPP would establish rules and requirements that would supersede those of national governments. That means environmental, food safety, labor, and a host of other regulations could be overridden in what would amount to a race...

Don't bother me with that now, Marvin. Yes, I've seen you juggle before. But Big Green's interstellar stage show has no slot for jugglers, even if they toss molten crowbars in the air five at a time. What the hell do you think this is, Ringling Brothers? Perry brothers, damn it. Whole different circus. Seriously, sometimes it feels like I'm running a two-bit talent agency in lower Broadway in 1947. Ever feel that way? Well ... I have, and it's right now. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has gotten it into his brass head that he needs to warm up our audiences, particularly in venues like Neptune, where the average daily high is something like 55 Kelvin (that's -218 Celsius to you and I). In that kind of climate, Marvin reasons, a little foot-stomping can't go amiss. Sure, he's got a point ... but juggling? On a plain-clothes rock stage? Come on. Now, I'm sure there are plenty of you - maybe five or six or even more - who are wondering what th...

Let me preface this tirade with the admission that I am no fan of bipartisanship. I agree with Chris Hayes (@chrislhayes) on the notion that nothing of any great value has come out of it in recent decades; in fact, quite the opposite. The Iraq War, the USA Patriot Act, etc. If that's how sausage is made, we should consider eating something other than sausage. That said, we are faced with some fundamental problems with respect to our rapidly eroding ability to govern ourselves at the national level. A handful of tea party House members, maybe 40, from heavily gerrymandered districts have become the tail that wags the Congressional dog, in essence. They have every incentive to continue and even enhance their extremism, as that is the only way they can please their hard-right constituencies back home. Around that core is another probably 40-50 House republicans terrified of being challenged by tea party types in the next round of primaries. Boehner needs these folks to maintain his ...

I say let's start rehearsing on Wednesdays. You can't? Why the hell not? That's your LUNCH day? Oh, right. Forgot about that. Just trying to pull together some Big Green rehearsals in advance of our anticipated interstellar tour to promote our new album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. Of course, I'm running into the usual scheduling conflicts. I keep forgetting how people arrange their time. Anti-Lincoln (who sometimes shakes a tambourine backwards for us), for instance, has what can only be described as a singular meal schedule: Instead of the usual three meals a day, he eats breakfast all day Sunday, lunch all day Wednesday, and dinner all day Friday. Hey - I don't judge. If it works for him, that's great. This does get to be like being a traffic cop, though. And what usually ends up happening is that Matt and I get together and just run through some songs, or make up new ones, or record an episode of Ned Trek for our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN ....

Kind of tired, so these will be brief. Cruz Control. Here we go again, lurching from crisis to crisis, the federal government sputtering along on fumes once more, its lifeblood of funding drying up. We haven't had an actual federal budget plan approved in years, just a series of continuing resolutions and last-minute deals. And now, as the federal deficit has shrunk (thanks in part to the blind cuts imposed by sequestration) to nearly half its size one year ago, the party who rules Washington - the tea party-fueled G.O.P. - has decided to drive us over the cliff once again, only this time it's about ideological, not budgetary, complaints. We must kill Obamacare (and fulfill a long list of other reactionary desires), or the economy gets it. Ted Cruz is working the reps in the House, but really ... the reps should know better. How can you call yourself a conservative and support playing chicken with the debt ceiling? Good call. Iranian president Rouhani called our own pres...

Marvin (my personal robot assistant), didn't I tell you to pick those Legos up about three hours ago? Can't you do anything without being told twelve times?! Are you even awake?! MARVIN!! Christ on a bike. Sloth has reached a new level of intensity here at the hammer mill, and it's no surprise. We have been cooped up in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill for the better part of three years (the worse part, too ... I remember those awful days...), not a hand's turn of work. Sure, we produced and released an album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick , and have dutifully (and pitilessly) posted our podcast THIS IS BIG GREEN every month, on the month (or quite nearly). But gainful employ? Naught, my friend. Goose egg. Arguably, it goes against human nature (and personal robot assistant nature, presumably) to be idle for so long. I've seen signs of restlessness, to be sure. Not from anti-Lincoln, of course, who spends most of his day in the forge room, swilling che...

This will be a quickie - I'm kind of pressed this week, for a variety of reasons. It's always astonishing to me to watch how issues in foreign affairs are reported in our nation's mainstream media. This week there was a major network interview with the new president of Iran, Hassan Rouhani. This was broadly characterized as part of a "charm offensive" that will include his appearance at the U.N. Any discussion of Iran is couched in the context of what is uncritically reported as their drive toward building nuclear weapons or a "nuclear weapons capability," which the U.S., Israel, and some European allies oppose. We have imposed very punishing economic sanctions, which cause tremendous misery amongst the Iranian population, and we and the Israeli government regularly threaten Iran with military aggression. So the reporting on the "charm offensive" is a bit like trash-talking the victim after kicking them in the gut (and promising worse down th...

You'll have to excuse me. I'm on the phone with Frigidaire. My dehumidifier has been recalled. Oh, the humanity! You know, if I had a pet manatee, I would consider naming him Hugh. Hugh Manatee. How's your day going? It's a little quiet around the Hammer Mill today, now that the dehumidifier has been unplugged. Dank, musty old place. Sometimes I think we're frittering our lives away in this ruin. But then, there are worse ways to go. And I'm rather fond of fritters, myself, particularly apple fritters with a dusting of cinnamon. Mmmmm, boy. What's new in Big Green land? Well, sales of our new album Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick are breaking all previous records. What records specifically? Well... it's at the top of all "least popular" top ten lists. Sales are reaching nearly one unit, call it none. Could have something to do with our marketing strategy. I told Marvin (my personal robot assistant) that tossing a copy of the album o...

When people consider themselves exceptional, they make themselves potentially dangerous. That's the gist of what Vladmir Putin had to say in his N.Y.Times op-ed piece, and people of many different political stripes here in the United States seem to have taken exception to this. I happened to be at the dentist the morning of its publication; the flat-screen t.v. above my dental couch was playing Fox & Friends, and they were throwing Stalin in Putin's face. No surprise there. (What else can you expect from a clown parade headed by Michele Malkin?) A lot of t.v. liberals didn't like it either. Frankly, though, for all of his failings as a leader, it's not hard to see what Putin was getting at. We have, under the banner of American Exceptionalism, invaded any number of third-world countries over the past century and a quarter. The results have not been positive. (Just ask them.) Putin and others are approaching us as if conducting an intervention; trying to keep us fr...

What the hell. Is that what we sounded like back then? We still sound like that now! Man freaking god damn. It's like being sealed in amber. Greetings from the Mill of our discontent. Well, it's mild discontent, let's say. Been a long time since the book of love. Wait ... why did I say that? Oh, right - I was listening to tapes from the 70s and 80s, so naturally my mind goes back to my neighbor's Led Zepplin albums. (I didn't have any; just Simon and Garfunkel, Josh White, and Mario Lanza. Oh, and some weird stuff.) We didn't sound anything like them, of course. In fact, we sounded strangely like us in the 2010's. It's as if we've been playing the same tune for forty years. FOR FORTY YEARS...! Why am I listening to old recordings? Simple ... we live in an abandoned hammer mill, we haven't toured in three years, and there's nothing else the fuck to do around this dump. Even Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is discontented. He even forg...

We heard more from John Kerry this week. Kerry, who voted in favor of the Iraq war back in 2003, is eager to demonstrate that he "gets it" and that this time is different. There is a post-modern cast to this drive towards war, as if by simply acknowledging past abuses the administration inoculates itself against committing them again by doing much the same thing in much the same way: aggressive war, waged against a nation that has not attacked us, under the banner of protecting the world from a brutal dictator armed with WMD - the "problem from hell," as U.N. Ambassador Samantha Power termed it. Only it's completely different now. You see, this time, the dictator used the weapons of mass destruction. Last time, sure, he had used them, but only more than a decade before (when he was our ally). Totally different. Obama, Kerry, and others have latched onto this trope about defending an international norm that goes back ninety years; one that only Hitler and Sadd...

Well, that was strange. It was just the end of July, and now look at us. Summer evaporated - must have been all that sun. It took a few weeks, but Matt and I finally got around to thinking that we should post an August episode of our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN. I'm sure some of you may have thought we were taking an August break, much like our political class and most people of means in Europe do every year about this time, but no soap. Let's get this clear: Big Green is a WORKING band. They'll be no slackers around this abandoned hammer mill, my friends. Yeah, I'm looking at YOU, Marvin (my personal robot assistant). It's up every morning at 5 a.m. and sweat! Phew, that was exhausting. Anywho, what do we have on the podcast this month? Well, let's have a look-see. First off, we've got a special episode of Ned Trek, entitled Ned Trek XII: The Manassery. Introduced by Lee Majors, as always, this ludicrous extravaganza features a peerless pantheon of figur...