Hammer Mill Days

Break out the ice cube tray. I need to warm my hands up over it. Yeah, that's better. It's all relative, my friends. Well, here we are, out on GJ 1132b on the first and final leg of our Fall 2015 Tour, entitled BIG GREEN’S CAPER BEYOND THE KUIPER (BELT), brought to by Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm, Inc. (Slogan: If it says Hegemonic, you know it's for keeps.) Hey, nobody told us it would be this freaking cold out here, way beyond the limits of our solar system. That's probably because nobody asked. In any case, we're here on this frozen piece of real estate, some 39 light years from Earth, trying to chip a performance venue out of the rock-solid CO2, and having very little success I'm sorry to tell you. How is the tour going? Well ... let me put it this way. Have you seen the movie "The Martian", by any chance? How about "Marooned"? If not, the essential point is this: never rent a spacecraft from a dodgy neighbor of Mitch Macaphee. (If...

My first thought when I heard the name of the male shooter in the San Bernardino massacre was of American Muslims across this country. My primary sympathy is for the victims and their families, but this incident is a disaster for the killers' co-religionists, particularly in the midst of a political season that features major party candidates calling for registration of Muslims and attempting to incite blood vengeance for invented celebrations of the 9/11 attacks. I have to think that just about every practicing Muslim in America is cursing the name of this crackpot kid and his wife. In the current atmosphere, this could get very ugly. Much as the press is obsessing over the terrorism / not-terrorism question, this is in essence another story of the proverbial three-foot creep with a four-foot gun. That these people were prepared for some kind of attack seems clear, but what they had was not all that exotic except in the respect that there was an awful lot of it - something like ...