Hammer Mill Days

I'm not a big fan of zero gravity typing. It's kind of hard to keep your fingers on the keys, frankly. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) - can you take dictation? There's a good chap. Okay, well ... as you may have surmised, we of Big Green are in transit this week. Our brief stint on GJ 1132b, the newly discovered world parked on the very edge of human knowledge was not hugely memorable. Thinly attended, let's say. Sure, we set up our gear and cranked through a few of our better known numbers. The venue was a cave. And I don't mean that it had bad acoustics, though it did; I mean it was literally a cave on a frozen world, populated by ethereal beings whose very existence is a matter of disputed mad science. (Mitch Macaphee tells me that they are real, but then he talks to elves and fairies, so it's hard to be certain.) Okay, so BIG GREEN’S CAPER BEYOND THE KUIPER (BELT) is kind of a bust. No surprises there. We played that one sorry gig, wearing our pres...

I'm guessing you don't need my opinion on Donald Trump's proposed ban of all Muslims from entering the United States - you've probably heard the full gamut, from Steve King to Bernie Sanders. My first thought was for all of the Muslim students I have known and met, both natural born U.S. citizens and visa holders from countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palestine, and others. I hear this insane rhetoric, growing louder by the day, and I think of a young fellow from Afghanistan - about the nicest person you could hope to meet - and what his thoughts might be about the people who "liberated" his country, then overstayed their welcome for 14 years. This is what happens in America when anything like a foreign-inspired terror attack takes place: we want to corral all Muslims and start bombing some country most of us couldn't find on a globe with both hands. I've lived through many cycles of this, from the Iran hostage crisis through the first gulf war, ...