Hammer Mill Days

I'll hold the ingots, and you swing the hammer. No, wait. We have to heat them up first. Where's my butane lighter? Left it on the stove, I think.... Oh, hi. Just caught the core members of Big Green (and its motley entourage) in the process of preparting our latest album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick , for publication and distribution. Very complicated process. You know how bizarrely complex our creative process can get; the very task of writing and recording these albums involves no less than 14,000 individual muscle actions per song (and that's not including all the grimacing). Christ on a bike - by the time we got our last album International House to market in 2008, my face muscles were frozen in place until well after the holidays. So, how does the manufacturing and distribution work? Simple. We melt down the .wav files into a slurry, pour them into rectangular forms, and cut them into shards - or "ingots" - about the size of a pack of cigaret...

Congressman Darryl Issa ("Step a way from the vehicle!") had his most excellent Benghazi hearing this week - a real blockbuster for the right. Bigger than Watergate, we're told. A heinous coverup on the eve of a presidential election. What a scandal! Issa will leave no stone unturned, chasing down those responsible for providing false information about the nature of the attack on our consulate. After all, four people are dead - four ! That's nearly half as many as died on our side this week in Afghanistan. Nearly 1/10 the number killed in one of the more notorious drone strikes in Yemen a few years back. Nearly 0.0001% of the number of civilians likely killed in Iraq based on false testimony and obfuscation. Sure ... if you want to hold someone accountable in high places, that seems fair. Just put the Benghazi culprits in line at the Hague behind Bush and Cheney, whose deceptions led us into two wars, one of which is still raging. That, of course, will never happen...