Hammer Mill Days

No, it's not the fifth day, Marvin. It's the sixth. Doesn't that processor between your ears do simple sums, for crying out loud? Six, man, six! Yes, I am correcting Marvin (my personal robot assistant) on his math. Or his calendar skills. Not sure which, actually. I put him in charge of counting down our "Six Days of Christmas" celebration. Why six? Well, turns out we couldn't afford twelve. And since we were too sick to finish our Holiday extravaganza on time, we all thought it only appropriate to provide a small ... even half-assed compensation. You're welcome, America! For those of you who missed it, this is what our lame celebration consisted of: Day One: Post of "A Very Neddy Christmas" on NedTrek.com . This is a rerun, yes, of our Ned Trek parody of Dickens' A Christmas Carol , featuring four songs, some bad celebrity imitations, and all the rest of it. Day Two: Soundcloud post of Vital Signs , a song off of our first album, ...

It's the year that wouldn't die. I suppose it always seems that way - years, like any unit of measurement, are artificial divisions by which no natural or artificial phenomena need abide. Still, it feels like we're accelerating to the finish line, and each day seems to bring more exaggerated indications of what a clusterfuck 2017 promises to be. Probably the most prominent feature of a discouraging week was the fallout over UN Security Council Resolution 2334 , which reaffirmed the longstanding principle that Israel's settlement activity in the occupied West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem is "a flagrant violation under international law" as well as "an obstacle to the achievement of the two-state solution". The Obama administration abstained on this resolution (i.e. did not veto it), prompting hysterical reaction from Republicans and Democrats alike and a long speech by Secretary of State John Kerry, which triggered more hair-on-fire reactions. ...

Where did those scissors go? Right ... I'll just use my teeth then, shall I? What the hell. I hate the freaking holidays! Especially when they get this close. Christmas looks a lot better from a distance. Yes, my friends, you caught us in the middle of another Cheney Hammer Mill meltdown. They're becoming more frequent in this new era, I must admit. Still, I have cause - trying to wrap up another holiday extravaganza, and it's not going all that well, frankly. I've got a em-effin' cold, for one thing. What's the other thing? Huh ... Don't remember. I always forget shit like that when I have a cold. One thing I'm having trouble wrapping is this year's Christmas show. It's a little hard to voice these things without a voice. It's like playing sousaphone parts on a tambourine. So the choice is either, croak everyone a merry Christmas, or .... we'll have to cancel Christmas. There's nothing I can do - it's this weather. (Okay, now...

Looks like somebody won the war on Christmas - I'm just not sure who. Talk about pushing on an open door. Every year, from about Halloween on, we are inundated with Christmas messaging, pressing us to shop, shop, shop, borrow, borrow, borrow, and so on. If someone's been waging a war against this hyper consumerist Christian Saturnalia, they haven't been very obvious about it. The right, of course, likes to hang this phony "war" on the left, but what they describe as an attack on them is really just another component in their ongoing efforts to push their religion in all of our faces. It's like when they whine about the "liberal" media - just a slight variation on the thief who cries "Thief!" Well, now the "war on Christmas" crew has a prominent new spokes-moron: President-elect Donald Trump, who has made a point of pushing Christmas at all of his victory tour rallies across the country. You've probably seen it - big "M...

Man oh man. Put another log in the furnace, Anti-Lincoln. Drafty old barn of a place. Are you sure we weren't somehow transported overnight to one of those Kuiper Belt planetoids? I'm freezing my ass off in here. Oh, hi. Yes, we're in the midst of another cold snap here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. Our local gas an electric company discontinued service here years ago, as you might suspect. The hammer forge has been pretty quiet since the 1940s. You might think, well ... burn the furniture, right? Well, we did that YEARS ago. I'm sleeping on a mattress on the floor, and no, I'm not burning that. (We're always looking for kindling. After almost twenty winters of this, the mansized tuber is looking pretty nervous.) Okay, so we have to break the ice in the bathroom sink every morning - is that anything to complain about? We have a roof over our heads ... or most of a roof, anyway. More importantly, we have a floor beneath our feet. I say that because, if...

The Syrian meltdown is horrible to watch, and thanks to the fact that much of the killing is being done by official enemies of the United States, we are actually able to watch it. The Syrian regime is doing the only thing it knows how to do - killing and torturing those who oppose it. The Russians, too, have only one speed on their killing machines. Lebanese Hizbullah fighters are there to support the regime, just as the regime and the allied government of Iran was there to help them in their time of need - it's hard for me to blame them, frankly. But the true crime of Syria is that there are many players involved in this senseless war and their all pursuing their own agendas. The United States has had dogs in this fight for years, despite what you'll hear on bullshit broadcast outlets like Morning Joe . They have provided covert support to rebel groups in Syria since before the uprising, so there's little doubt that some of those fighters assumed - as Chalabi did with r...

I don't know, I'm thinking it's time. What do you think? Not sure? Okay. When do you think you'll have an answer? I don't know about you, but ... I'm thinking it's time. Okay, well ... I'll be frank with you. (Just call me "Frank" from now on.) We are grasping at straws here in Big Green land, now that our interstellar tour has been scuttled. And here it is, the holidays. We were thinking that we'd be traversing interstellar space when Christmas week came, but no dice. Trouble is, that was going to be our excuse for not getting anyone presents - sorry folks, we're headed to a big gig on planet KIC 8462852. No time to shop! Well, THAT'S out the window. Any other good ideas for cheapskates? Marvin (my personal robot assistant) humbly suggested we hand out signed copies of our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas , which appropriately follows a theme somewhat tangentially related to the holidays. Of course, we've resorted to th...

I suppose I may as well work the same furrow as the mainstream media does and talk about President Elect Trump's cabinet choices. It's a bit like drinking urine, but here goes. The list thus far seems custom designed to irritate centrists and liberals. That's only to be expected, right? People who didn't support Trump, people who said bad things about him, people who worked for his opponent - their attitude is, well, fuck those people. And since they have no philosophical commitment to making government work effectively, the vengeance factor is of greater relative importance than it might otherwise be. Still, it is pretty stunning to see them assemble such a wrecking crew. We knew that a Republican win would mean hitting the ground running in January, and it looks like that's going to be the case. So what the hell - Trump has hired three generals so far: Flynn, Mattis, and Kelly, in order of crazy (most to least). Mattis seems problematic in that one might pref...

Did you guys hear that sound last night? Maybe about 3 a.m., I don't know. It was raining like hell, I think - pounding on the windows like a freaking hammer. At least I think that's what it was. Either that or a ... a ... rocket lifting off ... Well, that last paragraph is a depiction of what I sounded like when it first dawned on me that our leased Plywood 9000 rocket was hijacked in the middle of the night. As some of you recall, just before Thanksgiving we were preparing for a brief tour of some lesser known planets that don't get a lot of respect, like KIC 8462852. That appears to have been, well, scuttled. And while the Plywood 9000 is not what you might call luxury transportation, it apparently was functional enough to be stolen. Who is the thief? Can't be 100% sure, but the fact that Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, has disappeared probably isn't a coincidence. I think he was getting a little tired of our antics, or lack of same - it's been w...

Perhaps the most predictable response to the death of Fidel Castro was the corporate media's nearly exclusive focus on his critics' jubilation. I can't tell you how many times I've heard audio of car horns honking in Miami over the past week. Contrary to the impression viewers and listeners might get from this coverage, the exile community's joy was a small island in a sea of regrets pouring in from nearly the entire world, particularly those corners of it that benefited directly from Cuban assistance over the past 55 years. As was becoming the case with regard to our relationship with the OAS, our reaction to Castro's death isolated us from the rest of the hemisphere and, indeed, the globe. This cannot be overstated: South Africa and some of its immediate neighbors (Namibia, Angola) would not be the nations they are today without Cuba's intervention on their behalf in the fight against the racist Apartheid military and its allies. Whatever criticisms anyo...

Hey, got any old concert DVDs or VHS's? No? Okay, well ... that makes one of us. In fact, I have stacks of them in the forge room. That is, unless Mitch melted them down into something useful. Oh, hello. You just caught us in the middle of doing our year-end inventory, housecleaning, etc. I know, I know - that seems like a strange choice, given our recent preparations for an interstellar tour, but this is the sort of thing we do every year at this time, whether we need it or not. We sort of turn the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill upside-down and shake it a few times. Whatever drops out of the east-side windows goes into the junk heap. Then it's the DPW's problem. Some stuff is easy to get rid of. That cardboard carton our electric roll-out radiator came in? Probably don't need that anymore. Molded styrofoam from a shipping container? Fair game for the dumpster. Video tapes and DVDs, though .... that's another story. You never know when you'll want to watch the...

By all accounts, what we're seeing now is Trump being nice. If that's the case, it's going to be a very long four years. The last week has been very similar to the closing weeks of the campaign - very staid public appearances, not a tremendous amount of exposure to the press, but quite a lot of drunk tweeting. The somewhat restrained dressing down of VP-elect Mike Pence (who my wife and I keep calling Bike Pants) at the musical Hamilton drew a flurry of outrage from @RealDonaldTrump mostly centered on how "unfair" the cast members were being. This man is so fucking thin-skinned, it's kind of terrifying. What the hell is he going to do when foreign leaders start trash-talking him? Let me see if I can guess: whatever his last advisor told him to do. Unfortunately, the two corner offices of the White House will be occupied by two of the most unstable people in his entourage - former Breitbart editor (and man who looks like he spent the last two months sleeping...

Drat. Scuttled by a solar flare. That was a serious oversight on the part of that person we put in charge of planning our interstellar tour. Who was that again? Let's see .... oh, right. It was me. Well ... no ice cream for me tonight. Okay, well ... looks like we're having the interstellar version of a rainy-day schedule today, but instead of coloring books and tunafish sandwiches, let's break open the November episode of our THIS IS BIG GREEN podcast and see what's crawling around inside. Ned Trek 30: "The Deadly Queers". This thirtieth episode of our Star Trek parody is based on the classic episode " The Deadly Years ", in which the Enterprise command crew is affected by radiation that quickly turns them all into raving geezers. In our version, radiation causes the Free Enterprise crew to become progressively more gay - a fate worse than death for our hyper-conservative, free market, confederate flag-waving heroes. There's a lot of tastel...

After shock comes anger. I don't think I'll move on to negotiating - anger seems about right, particularly with the news emanating from President-Elect Trump's transition team. His closest adviser will be the spiritual leader of one of the alt-right's most popular web sites, Breitbart, so you know this is going to be a volatile time from the standpoint of those issues Breitbart tends to report on. Jeff Sessions as Attorney General, perhaps? That would certainly put black people's minds at ease. I think Trump may be considering Cap'n Crunch for secretary of the Navy. Sounds like a good pick, though he's rumored to have a crunchberry problem. Okay, so what will Trump's victory mean from a policy standpoint? Well, if he's anything remotely true to his word, we are likely to see the most reactionary policies ever advance in our lifetimes passed through congress and signed into law. This is not just about Trump - this is about a extremist Republican par...

What the hell, Mitch. A week ago you didn't care whether we went on this tour or not, and now you're acting like the mill is on fire. What's the matter with you, boy? And don't point that deadly laser at me - you know how nervous I get about that kind of thing. Well, it seems like Mitch is in kind of a hurry now to get off this miserable pimple of a planet known as Earth. Not sure what's behind the sudden change of mood. He woke up in a bit of a mood Wednesday afternoon after a long night of what I assume was mad science experimentation, and now he's all about planet KIC 8462852. That's fine and good, right, but if we're going there in the Plywood 9000 rocket we rented from SpaceY, well ... we may have trouble breaking out of Earth orbit. In fact, we may have trouble clearing the treeline. The truth is, that thing isn't getting off the ground at all. What's our plan B? Not sure we have one. There's plan 9 from outer space, but hey ... tha...

You've already heard enough about Tuesday's election, I know. My feeling since that night has been pretty much, the struggle continues - move on. I'll take a few moments, though, to share a few thoughts about Trump's win. First, this was a low turn-out election, plain and simple. Though Clinton won the popular vote by about 400,000 ballots Tuesday night, she received about six million fewer votes than Obama did in 2012. Trump received a million less than Romney's 2012 totals. Some of that difference can be attributed to turnout in large states like California, but many of the swing states - Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, for instance - were significantly down from 2012. People did not show up to vote for either party, but their absence was most keenly felt by the Clinton campaign, which was trying to call out the Obama coalition and failed miserably. So don't let anyone tell you this was a historic groundswell of support for Trump - far from it. He under-performed...

Try moving it to the other side of the tail fin. No, not that one! The dorsal tail fin! Okay, now hit it with a hammer a few times. Nothing? Hmmm .... how about if we light it on fire. Sometimes that helps. Oh, damn. I didn't realize I was typing this all into our blog. (I think that's called auto-typing.) Well, as you can tell, Big Green is working furiously to get our rented Plywood 9000 space rocket ready for launch before the election on Tuesday, when all hell is likely to break loose. At least, that's what the little voices in my head tell me. There are times when you feel compelled to stay and fight the good fight, and then there are those other times when you ... well ... decide to take a rented rocketship to another planet. That's a hasty decision, I know, but again ... those persistent little voices! Seriously, I am looking forward to a perhaps non-remunerative jaunt out to the Kuiper belt if only to free ourselves from the pressures of terrestrial life. ...

Here we are, once again, staring down the electoral precipice, praying for salvation. It's a quadrennial tradition, though sometimes more acute than others. This is certainly one of those times, though count me as among those who considered John McCain to be an existential threat to the nation back in 2008; his seemingly insatiable appetite for warfare would have led us in a very dangerous direction, to say nothing of his economic proposals. (He likely would have been a one-term president, but I'm not sure we would have lasted four years.) Now, of course, we're sweating out a resurgent Trump, buoyed by bad news for Hillary Clinton. This is a reactionary, climate change denialist detour we most certainly cannot afford at this juncture, but ... here we are. The fact that we so often find ourselves on the edge of disaster is an indication that we need to do something about not only this process of electing leaders, but also about the magnitude of power they wield in office. ...

Well, maybe a larger booster rocket would help. Or some tightly wound springs. Then there's the lever option, like a catapult - give me a lever large enough and I will move the world, that sort of thing. No? Okay, never mind. Oh, hi. Yes, we're grappling with the same conundrums that so vexed our predecessors in flight - how to defeat that old devil gravity. It's a little hard to imagine being able to reach planet KIC 8462852 without finding some way to break the surly bonds of Earth, whatever that means. Sure, it would be easier for Big Green to just give in and start doing terrestrial tour dates, packing ourselves into a multi-colored school bus and teetering down the road to Springfield and Lodi and East Aurora (unless we get stuck in Lodi ... again ...), but that would be an abandonment of all we hold dear. And in all frankness, gravity would still be vexing us! (Especially after a particularly long night.) The other day, a big semi backed up to the front gate of t...

Want a good reason to vote next month? Here's one: Paul Ryan's "Better Way" agenda, which he will drive home like lightning if his party is successful on election day. With a Republican congress and a Trump presidency, Ryan can pass the most regressive political program ever contemplated on the national level. At the core of this agenda will be another raft of massive tax cuts for the rich, including a 20% cut for corporate taxes, which will drain trillions of dollars from the Federal budget and (no surprise) prompt austerity action on social programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security. On top of that, the "Better Way" will use reconciliation votes to repeal sections of the Affordable Care Act, including Medicaid expansion. Ryan tested his caucus's ability to use this tactic on non-fiscal legislation this past term when he brought an ACA repeal vote via reconciliation. This will be repeated next year, but with a Republican president, their vi...

Look, Mitch ... you don't have to solve every problem with explosions. I know that cuts against the grain a bit, but at least try .... TRY not to dial it up to eleven every time you feel slighted. Thank you! Good day , sir! Jesus Christ on a bike. If you want anything done around here, you have to talk until you're green in the face. (That's probably how we ended up with the name Big Green, but I digress.) As I mentioned in passing last week, we are contemplating a little trip out into the nether regions of the solar system - not the most desirable area, it's true, but you have to book where they'll have you, right? Isn't that the first lesson of the music trade? Or maybe the second. The first is, play on, no matter what happens. Even if they set your banjo on fire, keep plucking. Then comes the bit about bookings. With me? Okay, so our plan was to fly out to KIC 8462852 with a brief stop at the as yet undiscovered Dwarf Planet at the edge of our solar syste...

We were treated to the third and final presidential debate this week, moderated by Chris Wallace of FoxNews. I can't decide which I found more annoying - the ridiculous utterances by the candidates themselves or the clueless pundit commentary on what a great moderator Wallace was. Maybe MSNBC is planning on hiring Wallace, I'm not sure - it seems like they were blowing him pretty hard the morning after, even though he apparently cribbed questions from the Peterson Institute and Operation Rescue. "Partial birth abortion," really? And no questions about climate change, of course. What a great news man. I could sit here an write about the obviously outrageous statements made by Trump over the 90 minute program, but you've probably heard enough of that. Suffice to say that the guy proves his unsuitability for the office of the presidency every time he opens his big yap. No one should need additional convincing, but alas ... this is America. No, what astonishes me is...

Going to Little Rock? But Big Green doesn't have any fans in Arkansas ... at least as far as I know. In fact, we don't have any fans south of the Mason Dixon line. Not since Cowboy Scat , anyway. What? Oh, okay .... never mind. Cheese and crackers, I thought we were going way on down south, but apparently we're going in a very different direction. Out towards KIC 8462852 with a brief stop at the as yet undiscovered Dwarf Planet at the edge of our solar system, and perhaps the undiscovered mystery giant planet as well. So at least our destinations are clear. That's the easy part. The not-so-easy part? Finding an agent who books that far out in the sticks, so to speak. (Actually, it's beyond the sticks and into the rocks.) We usually book ourselves in instances such as these, but times being what they are, it's helpful to have your interstellar ducks in a row before striking out into deep space. Speaking of ducks, we need to line up reliable transport as well....

Watching the Trump campaign this week, I am reminded of a collection of bad movie scenes my brother curated back in the 1990s under the title, Destination: Brain - we informally referred to it as "The Greatest Hits". As bad sci-fi movie aficionados, Matt and I loved to watch select passages from some of mankind's worst films but found it tiresome to sit through 90 minutes of boring dreck just to get to that "sweet spot" of bad acting, cheap specials, horrible dialog, etc. Matt cut together Destination: Brain so that we could enjoy those poetically bad movie moments extracted from context, and yet given new meaning by their juxtaposition with other poorly-wrought scenes. In any case, one of our favorite scenes was from a cheap-ass Frankenstein knock-off with a bunch of no-name actors and the clumsiest monster you ever saw. There is a climactic laboratory scene in which the monster's arm catches on fire, and he runs around the lab, screaming, trashing the ...

Well, at least we have a week to pack. That's something. What? Mitch sent himself back in time a week and is demanding that we leave now? For crying out loud, I hate when he does that. Okay, so you know that we live with a mad scientist. And if you know that, you probably knows that he has a tendency to obsess about outer space matters. Whether you knew it or not, it's happening again, this time over star KIC 8462852, which is flickering at odd interviews. Some have suggested that this is due to some undiscovered alien Megastructure, but I am skeptical. I cannot, however, say the same for Mitch, who is intrigued by this speculative feat of engineering know-how. He wants to see how they built THEIR megastructure so that he can build his OWN. The man has a competitive streak a parsec wide. Of course, it's not wise to ignore the entreaties of a mad scientist. And we've been collecting some dust in recent years, to be sure, so Big Green got its tiny heads together and d...

I know most people did not watch the quadrennial spectacle of the vice presidential debate this past Monday. For those who missed it, you didn't miss much. That said, it appears as though the corporate media in particular is intent on scoring this match-up on the basis of style points, thereby awarding the debate to former right-wing talk show host Mike Pence, one of the most reactionary men ever to adorn a major party presidential ticket. He was smooth and relaxed, the commentary goes, whereas Kaine was somewhat agitated and even rude. Well ... glad we're focusing on what matters. I have, however, heard some more interesting points made outside of the beltway punditocracy. Majority Report has been particularly good on this. Much of it confirms the impression I had at the time that Kaine was basically setting Pence up to defend, point by point, the most ridiculous and intemperate statements Trump has made during the campaign. Not rocket science, right? He was being pretty sy...

Mitch, I'll be frank ... I don't think this is a good idea. I know it's the middle of the night and most likely no one can see us, but that contraption makes a lot of noise and ... well ... never mind. Oh, hi. Yeah, I'm trying to talk our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee off of the ledge again. This time I mean it literally - he's up on top of the Cheney Hammer Mill, all worked up in a lather about the recent news from deep space. Did you hear about it? Well, in case you haven't, the space probe Rosetta has crashed into Comet 67P/Churyumov--Gerasimenko after having gathered data about what that cosmic snow cone is made of. This kind of news always sets Mitch off - he's apparently got a hand in every celestial body from here to Andromeda, I'm gradually discovering. He's a bit like Heath on the Big Valley. Every time a stranger comes to town, it turns out that Heath had "sworn to keel him" at some point. (I always wondered why brother ...

It's been another one of those weeks. Not sure how many more I can stand. This election is enough of a nightmare without the regular drumbeat of disasters, but I guess it always works like this on some level. Maybe I'm getting more sensitive in my dotage. In any case, this is what I've been thinking about this week: Lives not mattering. Police shootings of black men in Tulsa, Charlotte, and outside of San Diego demonstrate that this is not getting any better and perhaps is getting much worse. Whereas there has always been a degree of indifference about these incidents, as more and more take place without just resolution, people will tend to become inured to the issue, just as they have with mass shootings. And of course, in at least two of these incidents, details about the dead man's background have been made known, including brushes with the law. They did this with Patrick Dorismond back in the later nineties and it's become a favorite tactic: If you're bla...

Wait a minute. Here they come again! Everybody DOWN! Damn it. Okay, that was just a pizza delivery to the neighbors. You can all stand up again. Oh, hi. Kind of caught us at a bad time, actually. We are in the midst of a coordinated drone attack. No, not the military kind they use overseas. These are domestic drones of the kind you can buy at the corner store. As you may have heard, there are now hundreds of thousands of these suckers. The skies are black with them. One flock covers three whole states, and when they move ... oh, it's like THUNDER! (No, wait ... that was the buffalo, as described by a space archeologist on Star Trek. Sorry.) Now, when I say "attack", I don't exactly mean they are targeting us. It's just that there are so freaking many of these things, it starts to feel like an assault after a while. The pizza delivery joint down the street is using one. So is the florist. And last week our nasty neighbors bought one for their fourteen year old,...

There seems to be considerable interest in third party candidates this year, even though neither of the major/minor candidates is anything to write home about. Jill Stein is a smart person with whom I agree across a broad range of policies, but her notion of how presidential elections work is severely stunted and bizarre. Moreover, the party she represents is almost a total waste of space - an environmental activist party that only appears once every four years to compete in the presidential race. When it comes to organizing, they're not exactly Saul Alinsky. Gary Johnson, on the other hand, is clearly not the brightest ex-governor on the porch and hasn't made much of a case for why young people should give their vote to a ticket that's floated in part with Koch money, most likely. Perhaps his supporters are not aware that he would slash spending on just about any program that ever benefited them in any way. If American style libertarianism is about anything, it's abo...

Sometimes if you're up early enough in the morning, you can see the first rays of the sun breaking over the ruins of the abandoned mill next door. I think they made broom handles there or something. Now it's just some disheveled wreck that the sun rises over. Hey .... been there. Yes, friends, it's been many, many suns and even more moons since I started this blog about Big Green. We now have posts that stretch back nearly as far as those rays of sunlight. A rich body of balderdash, and it's getting balder all the time. Sometimes you forget where this all began - in some crappy dive on the west end of the city, the walls smelling of beer, dog crap on the stage, and a bartender who hates your ass. A lot of music careers start that way. Ours, on the other hand, was never anything else. (Yes, we are like most bands - spectacularly unsuccessful and damn proud of it.) So we took to the hammer mill and started hammering out recordings. That was in the nineties. Since then...

The polls are tightening, and it's no surprise. The Clinton campaign has spent the summer on the sidelines, courting centrist republicans and waiting for Trump to collapse under the sheer weight of his contradictions and xenophobic rhetoric. That strategy has been a dismal failure. Young people and the left are drifting away to third-party dead-end candidates or to simply sitting on their hands, mostly because the Clintons have done virtually nothing to attract them and plenty to piss them off, like naming fracking advocate Ken Salazar as transition chief and courting the approval of the likes of John Negroponte. When you see Trump ahead in Ohio, that's down to the fact that fewer left-leaning members of the Obama coalition are self-identifying as likely voters. That's a recipe for disaster. What would light a fire under these voters? Well, a more determined and effective candidate, for one. The Democrats have a good platform, they just need to push it harder. But there...

What's this summer been about? I've got nothing. What's happening in your world, mansized tuber? Finally taking root, are we? At least someone accomplished something this summer. Look at me, talking to a plant. What is this world coming to? Though I suppose a lot of people talk to their plants. Though that kind of makes it sound like the mansized tuber is my property, and he is most certainly not. He is totally his own plant, a sovereign creature of the universe, a law unto himself ... a ... an oversized sweet potato riding around on a dolly. At least up until recently. The tuber planted himself in the courtyard, so you could say it's "goodbye, dolly!" for him. So, it has been an uneventful summer, to say the least. I'm not sorry to see it go. Probably the high point was when Mitch practically self-immolated over the news that his planet orbiting Proxima Centauri had been discovered. That broke us out of our stupor for a few days, at least. Just recent...