Hammer Mill Days

What is this again? Beeswax. Do you have to keep it in my bedroom? We've got an entire abandoned 19th century mill here - there's plenty of space in the forge room. Marvin ?? Oh, hello. Didn't see you there on the other side of that iPhone screen. Thanks for dropping by Big Green's near totally useless blog, now more than ten years in the making! (Slogan: Blogging pointlessly since 1999.) You caught me in the middle of a small dispute with the help. No, we are not effete artists with domestics swarming all over the place, attending to our every whim. Certainly not! Our domestic workforce consists of a handful of surly operators, including: Marvin (my personal robot assistant) - Created by a mad scientist and one-time scrap metal dealer, Marvin helps around the mill with lifting fairly heavy things, moving those things from one place to another, and .... and lifting other fairly heavy things. Mansized tuber - Talk about growing your own! Matt harvested this oversi...

Rumor has it that the assault weapons ban is all but dead. There's a surprise. It has, after all, been more than a stretch of weeks since the Newtown CT children's massacre, so all of the will has drained out of our ever-reliable legislators. The rabid voices of reaction have once again gained the foreground and are pulling out all of the stops to keep open their option on tactical nuclear arms ... or whatever military weapon system will next be successfully marketed to bullet-headed Americans. We knew we had a problem after Newtown, but I don't think we realized just how deep that problem is. Assault weapons, high-capacity ammunition magazines, and a lack of regulatory oversight over who can purchase a gun and who can't - these are all crucial components of this national crisis. But they are not the core of the problem. Our problem is far broader than our persistent gun lust - it is the easy resort to violence for which we Americans are best known. This takes many fo...