Hammer Mill Days

Interstellar Tour Log: January 20, 2014 Somewhere in deep space There are some things you can accomplish quite well in space (e.g. mid-air cartwheels) and others, well ... not so much. I'm afraid our January podcast is an example of the latter. Those of you anxiously awaiting the new episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN , take heart: it's in the works, though Matt's interplanetary breathing apparatus is getting in the way of his doing a credible talking horse imitation. (You'd think it would be a positive boon, but no.) We're hoping this problem will be eliminated when we arrive at the gassy, Earth-like planet known as KOI-314c, which - I'm guessing - has a perfectly breathable Earth-like atmosphere. (Hey, they said it was Earth-like. That's all I need to hear. We're playing there.) Interstellar Tour Log: January 23, 2014 Somewhere else in deep space Well, we've arrived on KOI-314c, and if this is Earth-like, things have gone seriously downhill ...

Not that this is all that unusual, but I heard from various representatives of the Republican party and the "tea party" movement on NPR this morning. I really wonder why these right-wing types are so critical of NPR - the network is almost wholly devoted to providing them with outsized coverage. Every time they sneeze, Steve Inskeep is holding the rag. Sure, I listen to them regularly, because they have some good reporters, some good programs, and because they're better than everything else on my upstate New York radio dial. But that's a bit like voting for Barack Obama over Mitt Romney. Yeah, Barry's a pretty lousy president; he's just better by an order of magnitude than the object he was running against. Pretty low bar, frankly. What irks me, though, is the legitimization of truly extremist right-wing notions of governance (or lack of same) through what I'm sure NPR and other networks consider "balance coverage". A brief example: yesterday t...