Hammer Mill Days

I've taken to starting the day with a brief lyric from our storied past. (Mostly a two-storied past. We haven't lived in a lot of high-rises in our time.) For some reason, this morning a particular song of Matt's popped up, and I found myself humming along to this stanza from Natural Laws : What's that they've written all up and down the wall? Something about suction and my face. I don't know what they mean or why it's illustrated in green; is it some tasteless reference to my love for you? Some people recite Shakespeare; others read Supreme Court decisions to their children. Me? My tiny mind focuses on the familiar, and there are few things more familiar to me than the boatload of crazy-ass songs I've been living with for the past three decades. Lots of material there - probably a couple hundred songs, poorly recorded on cassette 4-track decks or something meaner, all demos. The copyright folks down at the Library of Congress must think we're a c...

This has been a week of sobering political news, to be sure. The gradual implosion of the institutional republican party continued apace, their preferred candidate falling into a deep hole that I suspect neither Mitt Romney nor an MSNBC town hall can pull him out of. Far more disturbing was various pieces of news from overseas: the heightened war of words on the Korean peninsula, the continued saber-rattling over Iran, and a strike in Somalia that killed 150 "terrorists", though no one is quite sure who these people were. Korea is potentially the most volatile of these. There are literally millions of people living under the gun there, and while the North's leadership is ultra paranoid and appears irrational, they have been driven to this point by the presence of an existential threat: us. We have scores of military bases in South Korea. The South Korean military is under the operational command of our Pentagon. On top of that, we engage in the annual provocation of our...