Hammer Mill Days

Which star is this again? I get them mixed up sometimes. We did Betelgeuse. We did Aldebaran. One big red, the other little yellow. Now it's time for a blue star ... Rigel. Perfect place to play the blues. Big Green playing the blues ... on our interstellar tour to support Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick ? Well ... sure, why not. That's some of what we started out by playing many, many moons (and many suns) ago, before we started writing a lot of our own music. We played Taj Mahal numbers, real standards like Statesboro Blues, and similar stuff, along with songs by The Beatles, The Band, Neil Young, etc. In our early days as Big Green, we had an alter ego cover band that performed under a series of ridiculous names, including "The Space Hippies", "I-19", and others. (One club owner, I recall, refused to hire The Space Hippies, claiming that, if he did, he would be "laughed out of Utica." That's when we founded the band, "Laughed o

Some more thoughts about issues of the day that seem very much like those of yesteryear (2013, that is). Iraq revised (again). After an absolutely awful year of conflict, fueled by the ongoing civil war on its northern border in Syria, Iraq has been back in the news this past couple of weeks - more specifically, the Iraq war and the battle of Fallujah. There has been the predictable discussion of, was the battle (actually, two battles) worth it, have the sacrifices our troops made been in vain, should we have left a residual force in place? In the process, though, the picture that emerges of the American invasion and occupation of Iraq is, frankly, hard to recognize. Just one example: when network regular General Barry McCaffery was on MSNBC this weekend weighing in on the capture of Fallujah and Ramadi by al Qaeda linked elements, he opined that, if Saddam Hussein hadn't been removed by the disastrous U.S. invasion of Iraq, he would have had a nuclear arsenal by now. The lie