Hammer Mill Days

What the hell. Is that the number of songs? Are you freaking kidding me? Just looking at it is freaking exhausting. All those parts! What the .... ! Oh, hello. I'm pretending to just notice you, there on the other side of this transparent screen that separates us. Hoo-boy, well ... you've caught us in the middle of an analysis of our song inventory. Little hard to keep close track of this stuff. We just write 'em, track 'em, and stack 'em. Never take the time to count them, for chrissake. Before you know it, they're cluttering up the closets, over-stuffing all of the dresser drawers, spilling out into the hallway, and god knows what. Bloody nuisance! So, on Matt's insistence (slave driver!), we've taken to inventorying them, starting with the most recent examples and working backward. What's first? Well, our Ned Trek songs, of course. Stacks of them. Our February episode of Ned Trek included no less than six new songs, including a number by Mr. S...

So many things going on in the news that it's hard to pick which one to pull my blowhard routine on. So I'll blow a little less hard this week, so to speak. Here goes. TPP / MAI - It's been a full court press on the Trans Pacific Partnership fast-track authority issue currently facing the House of Representatives. As it happens, WikiLeaks has released another leaked chapter of the agreement , this one dealing with "Transparency for Health Care", so to speak. The more that emerges on this agreement, the more it seems like the Multilateral Agreement on Investment (MAI) that was killed in the early 2000's - basically an investors' rights agreement, written by corporate lobbyists seeking to elevate the status of their superhuman client conglomerates to a status above that of sovereign nations. The House has turned fast track legislation back, fortunately, but this is truly the thing that wouldn't die. We will have to remain vigilant on this issue. Boo...