Hammer Mill Days

Hey, Matt .. what was that joke about the wooden balls again? Oh, right. Nah ... it doesn't work very well without the visual. Scratch that. Oh, hello. We are, of course, working on the next installment of our podcast. It's like the freaking Forbin Project, for chrissake. Takes us months to write the sucker, record it, edit it, compose and record songs, cut it all together, upload it, then collapse in a heap. (That last part actually happens kind of quickly.) Sometimes you want to just shout, "Enough!", throw up your hands and walk away. Mic drop! But no, my friends, no ... the show must go on. That said, well ... it HAS been kind of a long time. So we dropped another installment of our Ned Trek podcast - that's the show that is just Ned Trek and no random jabbering between me and my brother. This month's installment is extracted from one of last year's THIS IS BIG GREEN episodes, Ned Trek 23: Mitt's Brain . Based on the Spock's Brain episode ...

Just watching the ninth Democratic debate. Debate, so called, though of course there is no proposition that's being debated aside from who should be president. I've been watching it for a few moments, and I have to say ... it's kind of shrill. Lots of shouting, yes. Lots of finger pointing, accusations, counter-accusations. Lots of nasty looks, back and forth. Bad hairdos. You know the drill. Hoo boy. Our elections are way too freaking long. The process goes on for two years, pretty much. The debates are not very illuminating. It's more like political speed dating - no particular depth. This is a media driven process. The horse-race coverage of the primary campaigns has pretty much swallowed up MSNBC, for instance. They basically pushed Melissa Harris-Perry out the door because she didn't particularly want to be a campaign correspondent. Hard to blame her for that. Horse-race politics coverage is basically like sports journalism. The marketing approach is practica...