Hammer Mill Days

Back to the ongoing saga of Big Green's Interstellar Tour 2013-14: The Cowboy Scat edition... Interstellar Tour Log: January 27, 2014 Exiting orbit of KOI-314c Just in the process of attempting to reach escape velocity from KOI-314c, the strangely Earth-like planet recently detected by Earth scientists. Have to say, it was a bit disappointing. For one thing, we couldn't find any inhabitants. Well, of course there was a vast ocean of liquid methane that might have contained some life forms, but I wasn't going to be the first to volunteer to check it out. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) got a good look around; no clubs in site. Not even a Denny's. What the hell is Earth-like about that? Next trip, we bring Mitch Macaphee. Interstellar Tour Log: January 29, 2014 Entering asteroid belt (Yaaah!) Asteroids! We're taking a swing back through our home solar system, on our way to Sirius, and our trajectory appears to run straight through the dreaded asteroid...

Listened to Obama's fifth State of the Union address Tuesday night and was not surprised to hear many of the same small-bore themes we've heard from this president many times before. I am not someone you could describe as disappointed in the president: he is very much the kind of leader I expected him to be following his 2008 election. Probably the most prescient look at the then-early Obama presidency in 2009 was published in Harper 's under the title Barack Hoover Obama . The author Kevin Baker pointed out that, like Obama, Hoover was a very intelligent, well educated, worldly, and highly capable man - that was the reason he was elected president. And yet, Hoover failed miserably. Baker sums it up in this passage: Hoover’s every decision in fighting the Great Depression mirrored the sentiments of 1920s “business progressivism,” even as he understood intellectually that something more was required. Farsighted as he was compared with almost everyone else in public life,...