Hammer Mill Days

Electrodes to power, turbines to speed. Turn the key and .... nuts! Nothing again. Hey, Mitch - you're a mad scientist. Make yourself useful. Get this freaking car to run, willya? Oh, hi. Just working through the usual nonsense. Trying to get a car going. Working on a broken amp. Turning all the chairs in the house upside-down. (We do that to discourage visitors from staying too long.) There's never a lack of useful things to do, and lucky for us we have a lot of help. Mitch Macaphee, for one, can be counted upon to invent some new way of dealing with minor annoyances, like invasive insects or gravity. Ooops, did I say gravity? I wasn't supposed to mention that one. It's going to be a surprise. A BIG surprise. HA-HA-HA-HAAAAAA! Well, THAT took a dark turn. Anyway, aside from Mitch tinkering with ... uh ... continental drift, we have the able services of Marvin (my personal robot assistant) who can, among many other talents, life very heavy things. He picked up a who...

That was quite a convention, am I right? I'm just listening to what seems like the closing strains of Trump's acceptance speech, a veritable greatest hits reel of the more boring parts of his stump speeches. A lot more waving the bloody shirt, a full-throated exhortation of the new nativism, and a bizarre admixture of vague populist economic rhetoric (that is probably scaring the hell out of some in his own party) and core GOP positions on fossil fuels, school choice, military spending, etc. Over an hour at the podium and still going. Holy shit. I can't believe how badly they miffed that introductory video, though. An amazingly bad production, narrated by an ossified Jon Voight (last seen praising Giuliani), it seemed like a farce fit for John Oliver's show. I had to shake my head a few times - it was a jaw-droppingly lame attempt to make Trump's life resemble a Horatio Alger story, evidently written by someone in his inner circle, perhaps a family member. He real...