Hammer Mill Days

Looks like rain again. And forty, maybe fifty degrees. You call this winter? I call it bullshit, man. Fifty years after the blizzard of '66, and it's like freaking April out there in the middle of February. Freak. Ish. Right, I know. Don't start a blog post by talking about the weather. Very well. But I should add that, even though the weather's been less than frightful, we've been sticking pretty close to home this winter. Old habits die hard, I guess. And while the sun shone over these past few days, we've occupied ourselves with digging through the vast Big Green archive, looking for rare nuggets of a glorious past that never was. The odd gig poster. A broken guitar string. A broken guitar. A broken guitar case. (Interestingly, I found those all together.) Some will remember that my first instrument was the bass guitar. (And when I say "some", I don't mean anyone reading this.) When Matt and I started playing out in the late 70s, that was my...

After more than three years of talking about it, the way-too-long 2016 election is actually under way, and as always, the actual Iowa caucus results don't look very much like the polls. No surprises there. The Democratic side was a tie, no two ways about it. One thing you can say for certain about American elections - when they're very close, there's no way to sort out who really won, and in this case we may never know. The Clinton camp basically adopted the W. Bush strategy in Bush v. Gore: declare victory and move on. It is remarkable, to say the least, that Bernie Sanders, avowed socialist, 74 years old, no PAC money, etc., was able to take on a political machine that includes a former president stumping for the celebrity candidate. I think one advantage Bernie may have is that he is making a case for something different than the status quo. His presidency would not be a third Obama term, whereas from the sound of Hillary (and what we know of how the Clintons govern)...