Hammer Mill Days

Interstellar Tour Log: February 12, 2014 The still-unforgiving surface of Ceres, the alpha asteroid Greetings from camp slag! As you can see from the subject line of this dispatch, Big Green and entourage are still stranded here on alpha asteroid Ceres, here in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, a veritable no man's land of broken planets and random shards of rock, careering through an airless void in an endless race to hell. (Sounds like my morning commute, actually.) Readers of this asinine blog will know that Big Green, in the third leg of its Interstellar Tour 2014 to support galactic sales of our latest album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick , had performances booked in the system of Sirius, the dog star. Trouble was, our GPS navigation system - Marvin (my personal robot assistant) - got the names mixed up in his tiny 1978 Texas Instruments calculator of a brain, and ended up sending us to this lifeless slag in space. It's a bit like camping out, excep...

The news media has marked the approach of a significant anniversary - that of Iran's revolution, and it should come as no surprise to anyone who bothers to read this blog that they are leaving a lot out of the story. My main source on this is NPR, and while I don't set out to single them out (as a news organization, they're better than some, worse than others), they do have a remarkable capacity, by and large, to hew to the center of political and economic power in the United States. Their perception seems generally representative of that of the current administration at any given time. Anyway, there was the usual stories about boys choirs singing "Death to America!", the "Down with Israel" chants, etc. (Probably could hear that in Times Square if you listen hard enough.) One report I heard on NPR's Morning Edition on the 35th anniversary celebration in Teheran made passing mention of the eight-year Iran/Iraq war in the 1980s. Here's an excerp...