Hammer Mill Days

Rain, snow, freeze, thaw ... this freaking winter is a climatic yo-yo, full stop. The walls of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill are buckling under the strain of expanding and contracting water. Fun fact: water gets fatter when it freezes. Maybe it needs to add a few extra layers to keep warm - I don't know. What the hell am I, a hydrologist? (The only genuine hydrologist I ever knew talked like Elmer Fudd. Think about THAT for a minute.) Okay, so I'm wrapped in some old burlap, sitting in a distressed easy (or not-so-easy) chair, trying to weather the ... well ... weather against which the crumbling masonry of the mill offers little resistance. Sounds like a good time to give you folks a rundown on our recently-posted February installment of THIS IS BIG GREEN , our podcast. Imagine me opening the front cover of a well-worn volume, illuminated by the warm glow of a nearby fireplace ... ahem ... Ned Trek 27 - Who Mourns for Science? - Goodness me, is it 27 episodes already? (...

As promised, I wanted to scribble a few lines about the loss of Justice Scalia and the consequent shit-storm that has engulfed our nation's political landscape. I'm sure that most of your conservative friends have shared 10 and 20-year-old speeches by Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden as support for the insupportable position taken by the G.O.P. leadership in the Senate. You could do worse than to remind them that (1) both of those speeches were made in a year when there was no vacancy on the court, and (2) both speeches came something like a year after extremist justices were appointed by a Republican president and approved by the Senate without filibuster - in the case of Biden's speech, it was Clarence Thomas, who was approved by a Democratic controlled Senate. (Though it's hard to tell because he's so deathly quiet, Thomas is to the right of their sainted Scalia.) All that said, Obama's natural inclination will be to offer an olive-branch appointment, something ...