Hammer Mill Days

We return to the ongoing saga of Big Green’s Interstellar Tour 2013-14: Cowboy Scat goes galactic. Interstellar Tour Log: February 5, 2014 Unforgiving surface of Ceres, the alpha asteroid After a solid week on the surface of this, well, remarkably solid asteroid (a crust of solid titanium! ... or so my geologically impoverished mind/brain tells me) we're coming to the realization that this is not so brief a layover in our Interstellar Tour 2013-14. Given this reality ... and the fact that Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is insisting that I do so, I will take a few moments to share my usual dissection of our recently distributed podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN - now with more Green! Anyway, here's what we have for the February podcast ,* posted only days ago: Ned Trek XVI: A Mock Time Yes, believe it or not, we are on the 16th episode of this ludicrous audio remake of several failed sixties television shows, starring Willard Mittilius Romney as Captain Romney of the

This past week, on The Daily Show , Patrick Stewart made an appearance as the Chinese moon probe "Jade Rabbit," complete with ludicrous spacecraft headgear. He was reading the strangely lyrical farewell message advanced by the Chinese government as having come from the probe. Now, that was funny, but I'm afraid it barely meets the level of ridiculousness attained by political pundits now deployed across all media, busily framing in this fall's election as a bounty-in-waiting for the Republicans and basically a replay of 2010. Here we are, nine months from casting the first votes and it starting to sound like the election's already over. Part of the problem is that the 24 hour news cycle has a voracious hunger for news that's easy to report on. The horse race of political contests is a particular favorite, so election season never, ever ends. The moment 2012 was settled, the pundits were talking about 2014 and even 2016. Now the talk is constant about the