Hammer Mill Days

Well, I'm back from watering the man-sized tuber. Never thought his personal life decisions would so dramatically affect my schedule, but apparently so. He has to be watered two or three times a day, and it looks like I'm nominated to be his personal gardener. By default. (Well, I can't leave it to anti-Lincoln. He'd set the poor bastard root vegetable on fire!) Anywho, this seems like a good time to talk about our May THIS IS BIG GREEN podcast and what you're likely find lurking inside that largish mp3 file. Here's the rundown: Ned Trek XVIII: Captain Fricassee - This is a riff on the "classic" Star Trek episode "The Enemy Within", in which the captain - in this case, Willard Mittilius Romney - is divided by a transporter malfunction into a good half and a bad half. Our version features a Romney doppelganger that embodies the southern reactionary buried within every conservative candidate for higher office. Gluttony saves the day. Don...

Two events in the news this week struck many - including me - as both depressing and unsurprising. One was the sickening mass killing in California by a depraved disciple of the so-called "men's rights movement", something that seems most vibrantly to inhabit the netherworlds of the net. The other is the ever-ballooning VA debacle, fueled by almost daily revelations about other service members and veterans being denied care to the point of death. No need to explain the depressing element of either of these - the facts are plain and, well, devastating. I will dwell a bit on the unsurprising aspect of the events because it angers me, and as the late Maya Angelou instructed us, anger can be a positive force, so long as it doesn't lead to bitterness. She has a point there. Would that someone had impressed this upon the young shooter in Isla Vista some years back. The shooting cannot surprise us, any more than extreme weather can in the wake of Sandy and Katrina. We go...