Hammer Mill Days

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...