Hammer Mill Days

I got socks this year. Lots of socks. And a few discarded ties. Plus some bricks from the courtyard. No, they weren't loose - the mansized tuber just pulled them out of the courtyard and gave them to me. Yeah, I put them back. Now that's a holiday to remember. Well, I don't know what kind of a Christmas YOU had, but here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill in upstate New York, we had a rousing celebration that quite nearly woke the dead. No, it wasn't well attended, but Marvin (my personal robot assistant) cranked up the stereo and started playing random sides from Sun Ra to Fountains of Wayne. It was Christmas in crazytown, and it didn't go unnoticed by our neighbors, who (I feel compelled to say) were ... ahem ... a bit LACKING this year in the HOLIDAY SPIRIT. ( You heard!) Then there were random fireworks. Now, I hate to be a spoil sport, but I don't like hearing explosions late at night. It makes me jump, and my mind goes straight to some imagined misha

No, this isn't a post about the weather (though it is cold as hell out there). I just wanted to make a couple of points about the possibility of bipartisan cooperation in 2018 - something that's being kicked around the corporate media as if it were somehow desirable. This is consonant with the oft-stated desire to see "things get done" in Washington, as if the precise nature of the things being done was somehow irrelevant; that legislation passed is a good in and of itself, abstracted away from the substance of the bill. Another piece of conventional wisdom, served up daily. I expect I'll pass on this, and I would recommend my fellow left-leaning Americans do the same. As far as I'm concerned, the GOP has demonstrated its bad will in about as many ways as can be imagined. And before anyone gives me a lesson on how politics works, on how you can disagree from morning to evening but at the end of the day you need to work together, etc., let me just say that t

Let's see how we're doing here. Shovel the front walk? Check. Peruse the local shops for root vegetables to give to the children? Check. Decorate the forge room with robots? Check. Yep, I haven't done ANY of those things. (I keep checklists of things not done; a "to-don't" list, if you will.) I don't think I have to tell you that Christmas is a very special time of year around the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. No, this I think you know well. Not because we're religious or Jesus freaks or anything like that. No, the specialness is more about quietude. This sleepy little corner of post-industrial upstate New York gets a little sleepier around the holidays, mostly because people take off to visit relatives, friends, etc., in far-flung corners of the globe, leaving the village almost entirely to ourselves. No beeping delivery trucks backing up to loading docks. No drunken neighbors threatening the kid next door. Peace on Earth, man. Even Mitch Macaphe

Weeks like this give the lie to any suggestion that Donald Trump does not reflect the true character of the Republican party. If there has ever been a more nauseating display of fawning over an American president, I have yet to see it. The celebration over the passage of the "Tax Cuts and Jobs Act" was reminiscent of those bizarre, banana-republic type cabinet meetings where officials take turns falling all over themselves to praise the Dear Leader. This time, it was congressional leaders (many of whom have momentarily taken issue with the president) crowing about what a great legislative partner he is, and Mike Pence, who mostly delivered the national security strategy speech he memorized from earlier in the week. I could see my own Trumpite Representative, Claudia Tenney, in the front row, applauding, gawking at the president in apparent awe, taking snapshots of his ample ass with her phone like some teen fan at a concert. The conventional wisdom on talk television, of co

I can play any instrument. Piano, bass, six string guitar, five string guitar - I broke a g-string yesterday (note that I didn't say I could play them well ) - kazoo, contra-bass kazoo ... I think that's about it. That's all the instruments there are, right? Actually, I'm not super good at any of those instruments. If I were, then I would be insufferable or famous or something; perhaps both. Or neither. Well, that covers all of the possibilities. I don't like leaving things to chance. (And I don't mean Chance the gardener.) Thing is, I like playing instruments, even if I do it, well ... badly. So even though I've never been what I would describe as a punk musician, I do share that piece of the punk ethos - technical skill on your axe is not paramount. So if you see me strumming an acoustic guitar, don't look for a pick; I basically use thumb and forefinger. Piano? Just thumbs. Gotta move fast to make that work. Many instrumentalists leave distincti

There's a lot to say about the Republican's craven plan to push through a massive tax plan in a matter of days. I needn't point out that the final bill is likely to be a cobbled together mess, one that we'll be struggling with for many years to come if it ever finds its way to Trump's signing hand. Nor do I need to repeat the obvious fact that this is a tremendous giveaway to the richest Americans, to corporations, and to the GOP's donor base, one that demonstrates the degree to which the Republicans' supposed concern over budget deficits is just another ploy. What I find most infuriating about this legislation is that it is being proffered at a time when its chief beneficiaries - the richest of the rich - are doing just fine, thank you very much, and corporate America is sailing from strength to strength. The last thing they need is more money in their pockets. This is also a time when our armed forces are deployed in conflicts all around the world. Trump

Yeah, I'm back. Did you miss me? Didn't notice I was gone? Okay, then. (Sigh...) Not for nothing that Big Green was once described as one of the most obscure bands out there. We are freaking invisible - just ask the people standing behind us, all of whom you can see clearly, because ... again ... we're freaking invisible. But just because we're invisible, that doesn't mean we're inaudible. That old adage about children being "best seen and not heard" doesn't apply here, as we are not children, and we are not quiet. Nay, we are LOUD. Well, loud-ISH, and occasionally louder than that. Exhibit A: our song Jesus Has A Known Mind, which we've featured a couple of times on our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN . That's loud, if you turn up the volume. Try it next time you play the podcast. Or put your iPod bluetooth speaker in the middle of a cavernous room, then crank it up to 11. That should be the advisory on all of our albums. That and "avoid

It's been quite a week for our low-rent gropen-fuhrer, and as of this writing it's only Wednesday. First we saw him re-tweet Euro-fascist videos, then excoriate the FBI in response to Flynn's indictment, followed by a full-throated endorsement of Alabama Senate Candidate, state Supreme Court Justice (twice removed), and mall stalker (many times removed) Roy Moore on Monday, opening of vast Western lands to oil and gas development on Tuesday, and U.S. recognition of Jerusalem as Israel's capital on Wednesday. Throw in little details like the travel ban being reinstated by the Supreme Court Tuesday, his allies in the Senate passing a draconian "tax" bill (larded with much else besides) the weekend before, and stepped up provocative war games on the Korean peninsula this week, and you've got ... well ... just what you voted for, America. The Jerusalem announcement basically lights a fuse that's been rolled out and set for decades. As Trump pointed out,

In remembrance of our mom Iris, who passed away this week, I'm posting the lyrics to this song Matt wrote more than a few years back (one of my favorites) that keeps running through my head (and out of my mouth). It's called Don't give up the ship , and here it is: Well, it grieves me when I see you in some moldy homemade raft You've no life jacket, there's no precautions You're spinning downstream and you're laughing Well, I'm not about to stop you I've not the will and I've not the means Still I stand here like I'm waiting A world without you I've never seen You say, read it off the flag, boy Don't give up the ship says the flag that flies above the turbulent waves Don't give up the ship Be a fool and hold the course away from the shore Sailor learns something from each splinter in those old and creaking boards Now you're not apt to change your reasons You'll never reinvent the doors that led you

Okay, time to clear the table. That's right - push yourself back a few inches, climb to your feet, and start gathering up the plates. Chop chop! Hey ... don't throw that ladle at me! OUCH! Well, I hope YOUR Thanksgiving was better than this. Here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, it's catch as catch can, as you might expect. We have no particular tradition with respect to this holiday; no frantic cooking, no decorations, no ritual television viewing or binge shopping. Just another pot of gruel, boiled to a fare-the-well, and ladled out to the dwindling contingent that is the Big Green collective. Solidarity forever! Actually, it sounds worse than it is. Everybody wants an extra day off, right? Now, you might be justified in asking, "Day off from what?" My only rejoinder would be that it takes a lot of creative energy to write, record, and distribute songs in this day and age. In anticipation of the question, I have asked Marvin (my personal robot assistant)

If you had your fill of thankfulness over the past week, this might be a good time to look in on some stuff that's happening at the national level that seldom gets reported on. So much media attention is focused on the current administration's relationship with the Russian government, various sexual harassment revelations, and Trump's latest asinine tweets (all important topics, to be sure), some of the more impactful stuff the administration and its Congressional allies have been doing is slipping by unnoticed. Time to fight back ... and give thanks for the Internets. Court-Packing. As Trump appoints circuit court judges at an unprecedented pace, his friends and supporters in the Senate have greased the skids obligingly, disabling the filibuster and individual Senators' right to put a hold on nominations - methods the Republicans used liberally during the Obama administration to prevent his nominees from being seated. Now the reactionary Federalist Society has prop

I'm kind of busy right now, Marvin. Just tell them that I can't talk. And in any case, I don't want to go on a Caribbean Cruise, even if it IS free. Cheese and crackers. (Hey, that sounds kind of good right about now.) Writing is a hungry business. Just ask Hemingway, the guy with the moveable feast. I'm a little sensitive about interruptions today, so I beg your pardon ... Marvin (my personal robot assistant) keeps coming into my study (a.k.a. the old forge room in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill) with nonsensical requests. Stuff like, "You've got a phone call from Missouri" or "There's a brush salesman at the door" or "Leave the building - it's on fire". Be honest - would you listen? What am I working on so feverishly? Ah, nothing. Just the script to this year's Ned Trek Christmas Special. Last year we did an "It's A Wonderful Life" parody. The year before I believe it was "A Christmas Carol"

The Saudis have destroyed a key airport in Yemen, a point of entry for crucial aid shipments, making the grim prospect of a major famine even more likely than before. This happened the same week that the Kingdom apparently chose to hold Lebanese prime minister Saad Hariri against his will, by some accounts, and forced his resignation (Hariri now disputes this) in an effort to sow discord in a country that survived a 15-year sectarian civil war. This multi-pronged effort to roll back Shi'a influence in the region is largely the handiwork of Arabia's 32-year-old crown prince Mohammed bin Salman (or "MBS" as the folks in the know call him), a man who is taking the blood-stained legacy of Saudi's extremism up to the next level. Praised by many in the American imperial class as a "modernizer", Prince Salman has leveled neighboring Yemen over the past two years, turning it into one of the world's most deadly war zones. This attack was probably born of th

Man, is that the wind? Sounds like a freaking freight train. There goes the good weather. It was a nice couple of days, but hey .... all good things must end. (Hey Marvin ... got any more platitudes I can borrow? Thanks, man.) Well, it's November in upstate New York. Things start slowing down a little bit around these parts. That's partly why we had time to finish another episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN and post it this past week. Haven't heard it yet? Well, this is what you have to look forward to: Ned Trek 34 - Shitty and a Bit of a Stretch. Another Ned Trek non-musical episode, this one loosely based on the classic Star Trek script "City on the Edge of Forever," originally written by famed sci-fi writer Harlan Ellison. Captain Willard, Mr. Ned, Mr. Perle, and the Nixon android all leap into Earth's history in an attempt to stop a crazed Doc Coburn from changing the past and foreclosing on the future. Will they succeed? Well ... robo Nixon does start a home

My reaction to Tuesday's off-year political races is the same I always have with regard to elections: you can't win by staying home. A lot of people on the left get frustrated with the Democratic Party (I certainly do), but in our current political system, only two parties have a reasonable chance to win elections, particularly on a national scale. We have to work within the Democratic Party even as we organize outside of it; and we have to vote Dem (when such a vote is available) even if the candidate is not our preferred choice. The alternative (i.e. sitting on your hands) results in what we have today: a national government run entirely by the most reactionary Republican Party in history - a political cabal that is doing enormous damage by undermining the work of vital agencies, appointing right wing judges, and more. This destructive work is moving at such an alarming pace that it is doubtful as to whether we can regain sufficient political power to stem the tide, let alo

Okay, subject matter experts - let's get down to it. We've written about fascists on the rise. We've written about space diseases. What's left to write about? What? Christmas again? Oh, Jesus Christ on a re-gifted bike. Very well. I'll tell you, you ask a question around this place and you come away with six more questions. At least that's an even number. That said, we're still making music over here in Big Green-land (and no, I don't mean big Greenland .... everyone makes that mistake), and well, Christmas is coming, so ... that means more Christmas themed songs, right? Donald Trump and Bill O'Reilly will be overjoyed to hear that there's music that uses the word "Christmas" occasionally, even if it is mostly for humor and ironic purposes. (Or porpoises. Like hipster porpoises who do shark-like shit just to be ironic. You've seen that, right?) As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, we are planning a holiday podcast extravaganza

What a horrendous week for New Yorkers. Condolences to those affected by this ghastly Halloween attack. Don't wait for words of encouragement and sympathy from the big cheese - he's too busy attacking your senator on Twitter. Literally insult upon injury, but not surprising. It's also been a pretty rough week in Puerto Rico, still reeling from Hurricane Maria, and of course in Somalia, in the aftermath of that horrific bombing. I could go on, but what's the point - you know it. Sad thing is, none of these people will get any reasonable amount of moral or material support from the current administration. The reason couldn't be clearer: too many dark people, and no potential Trump voters. Not that Somalia has been treated like anything other than a doormat in previous administrations. Trump, though, has singled out Somali refugees in America for criticism, sowing hatred and distrust among his legions. The refugees are black, like the family of La David Johnson, and

Okay, everybody - band meeting. Let's do roll call. Matt Perry? Present. Myself? Present. Marvin (my personal robot assistant)? Present, but lacking in agency. Mansized tuber? Absent. (He planted himself in the courtyard again, and frankly, it's just too cold today to have the meeting out there.) Yeah, it's been a while since our last meeting. A few weeks, anyway. Like August 1987. We are a self-governing collective, but not a very well organized one, truth be told. When you live in an abandoned hammer mill (or an abandoned refrigerator, for that matter), there's little else to do besides wander around and try to keep yourself occupied between tours. We might go crazy for a spell and even (dare I say it?) rehearse a few numbers. Such madness has taken hold of us on more than one occasion. I suppose you're wondering how it is that we manage to support ourselves. Well, I don't think I have to tell you that we are lousy salespeople ... perhaps the worst ever.

Well, we've heard from Arizona's senators. Sort of. Does this amount to anything? If so, I don't know what, but judging by the coverage afforded by the mainstream media, I must be missing something. I've heard Jeff Flake compared to every great orator this side of Cicero over the past few days, but honestly - what did he say? What is the substantive issue here? It sounds to me like tone, "integrity", adherence to accepted norms of behavior, and mental/emotional stability. Important, yes, when you're talking about the President of the United States - a man who can, on a whim, destroy the entire planet. It may be dawning on some of these GOP senators - at least the ones no longer eyeing re-election - that having a crackpot in that most powerful chair on Earth may not be such a good idea. Thing is, where the hell were they last year when they could have done something about it? I think you know the answer to that. Trump is not an anomaly - he is the produc

Is this one of those years with a "7" at the end? Right, I thought as much. I guess that's another decade in the can then, right? Fuck all - I am old. Oh, hi. I was just having a little conversation with Marvin (my personal robot assistant). He keeps a lot of useless information in his memory banks, and among those bits and bobs are statistics about the history of Big Green, the music collective we formed some thirty years ago. Yes, I believe we adopted the moniker back in 1986, in a 2nd floor apartment in Ballston Spa, NY. That was the first incarnation of Big Green, which cracked apart in - yes - 1987, leaving it in the state it remains in today. (And no, I don't mean the state of New York.) Some may think it's a bit of a problem that our band historian is a robot. That's not that unusual, actually. I hear that the historian for "Captured by Robots" is also a robot. And then there's Kraftwerk. All German bands have robot historians, from wh

Four special forces soldiers were killed in the African nation of Niger earlier this month, and the Trump administration doesn't want to talk about it. There's been no discussion of what our policy is in Niger or more broadly in that region of Africa, no information on the circumstances of the men's deaths, no nothing. It's a bit reminiscent of the Yemen raid that went bad just a couple of weeks into Trump's tenure, except that they HAD a story for that one and it turned out to be as bogus as a Linkletter million dollar bill. Another thing the Niger incident echoes somewhat more dimly is the Benghazi attack back in 2012. You know, four dead Americans, questions about how much support they received from Washington, and so on. So I imagine Trey Gowdy will start holding hearings on this quite soon, right? (Trey? Are you out there, Trey?) Okay, so, the thing MSNBC has latched onto is Trump's call to one of the relatives of the lost soldiers in Niger and his comm

Time to crank out another number? Right, then. One ... two ... one, two, three, fo... What? Wait for what? Oh, right. We need to pick a song. My bad. Well, obviously we're a little out of practice. It's been a while since Big Green performed in these parts, and while we don't have any plans to set up at the local gin mill and run through the '93 set list (just like the old days, Steve), we could do with a little rehearsal time. A friend once told me that rehearsal is just a crutch for cats who can't blow. (No, he didn't wear sunglasses and a tam.) I like to think he had a point. It makes me feel better about doing nothing, and doing nothing is nothing if it isn't fun. Not to say that we're dead idle - far from it. This week we're recording the next episode of Ned Trek. We're also working on the songs for our Christmas Extravaganza, rummaging through our big burlap sack of old Xmas songs that was the genesis of our first album, 2000 Years To

It's hard to overstate how disturbing the news has become over the last couple of weeks. Gradually some elements of the Republican political establishment are beginning to acknowledge the obvious fact that Donald Trump is fundamentally unfit for the office of the Presidency. Astonishing. Why someone like Senator Corker wouldn't have realized this more than a year ago, when he had the opportunity to help prevent this disaster, defies belief. Like his colleagues, it obviously wasn't as important to him as having a Republican president - any Republican president - who would sign legislation and implement the extreme right policies his party has long advocated. They did everything in their power to put an unstable man in the most powerful office on earth and place the nation in jeopardy just to gain marginal political advantage. Now Corker and his colleagues can feign surprise when the bonobo they elected throws feces at them from his perch in the White House. And because th

There's that funny music again. And the really strange thing is, every time I hear it, there's someone at the front door. What's that? A door bell? Oh ... okay. Never mind. Well, I thought I was on to something important there; maybe a new scientific principle born of some random observation, like noticing a minor irregularity in the orbit of Mercury. No such luck, my friends - looks like the Nobel Prize for Physics will be going to someone else this year ... again. (Don't know how many of these disappointments I can stand.) I understand that our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, has been nominated for the Ignobel Prize in making things blow sky high. That's a tough one to win - it's a little hard to guess how high sky high is. Lord only knows, we don't do what we do here at Big Green for the love of prizes and little metal statuettes. Neither do we do it for the money. (The simple fact is that there IS no money in what we do.) Nay, we just do it for

Let's have some fun with semantics, shall we? Start with the word "gun". What is a gun and when does it stop being a gun and become, say, a bazooka or a howitzer? Though I suppose you can say that a howitzer is a kind of gun - big guns, as in "Bring out the big guns!" How about a staple gun or a glue gun? So a "gun" just a device for expelling something, right? That's why it also serves as one of umpteen English euphemisms for penis, among other applications. Well, fortunately for you 2nd Amendment purists out there, this very confusing word "gun" does not appear anywhere in the text of your favorite founding document of the Republic. The Constitutional scholars over at the local NRA gathering simply assume the word "arms", which is used in the amendment, means every manner of gun from the .38 special to the Kalashnikov. Why they stop there I have no idea. Given the vague wording of the 2nd Amendment, our founders seem to leav

Okay, ready? On three ... one, two, THREE! Arrrgh. I meant, on the count of three LIFT the freaking thing, not wave your hands in the air. What the hell's the matter with you? It's like you just don't care. Yeah, I guess you could say we're having a little moving party here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, Big Green's adopted home for the last two decades. (I think we technically have squatter's rights, but what law is there in a place such as this?) No, we're not vacating the premises - far from it. I just wanted to move my piano from one room to another. No particular reason. Maybe that's why I can't get any cooperation out of this crew. I KNEW I should have done one of those leadership retreats! Curses. Sure, there are useful things we could all be doing, but who's got the time for that? I mean, I've been putting off restringing our borrowed electric guitar for about two weeks now. That sucker isn't going to string itself, righ

I mentioned last week that I have some problems with the Ken Burns series on the Vietnam War. That was on the basis of just the first episode, so to be fair, my comments were a bit preliminary. I have not seen much of it since - just the odd half-hour here and there. (Frankly, it's hard for me to come up with 18 hours of viewing time over the course of a week or two.) That said, the episodes I've seen since the first installment have done nothing to change my estimation of the overall project. It's important to get many and varied perspectives from American veterans; I'm all for that. But the Vietnamese perspective that I've seen thus far has been very limited and two-dimensional. Further, the narrative seldom departs from the neo-imperial framing that has always defined mainstream retrospectives on this brutal war. We're told, for instance, that in 1969 Hanoi would not consider an agreement that would leave the Saigon government in place. Actually, it wasn

Here comes the sun ... and there it goes, right over the back of the mill. Must be autumn. This place is like freaking Stonehenge - you can set your watch to the movement of the shadows. Well, the season passing doesn't mean much around here. I'll be honest: we of Big Green never went in for summer activities in a big way, so the warm months are just about keeping out of the sun and wearing open newspapers on your head like a tent. Unless you're Matt, of course, who wears a hat and spends half of his life out amongst the wild critters, rain or shine, snow or hail, you name it. The rest of us? We all busy ourselves with indoor activities, like bending pretzels and juggling priceless objets d'art . (That last one we don't do a real lot. Like, well ... never.) It's hard to keep track of what our entourage is doing in any given season. Some are more active than others. Anti-Lincoln, for instance, had and idea for a discount retail business. He was going to plant

Man, this week has been a clusterfuck. Not sure exactly where to begin, but I guess the best option is just to dive right in. The Zombie Rises. Repeal and replace is back again this week, this time advanced by GOP senators Graham and Cassidy, and it's the predictable formula. They basically want to block grant the program, including the Medicaid portion of it, which is the Republican's favorite target just lately. According to a study cited by the Washington Post, 34 states would lose funding, and the states with Medicaid expansion and relatively generous benefits would be the biggest losers. It will also throw millions off of their coverage - no surprise there. The only thing that can stop this now is, well ... us. Call, march, occupy, whatever you can manage. Delay this vote until after 9/30 and it will be dead for a while longer, at least, and that's the best we can manage under the circumstances (i.e. good enough). Hurricane Maria. What a horrible storm, and the f

I think it's over there, in that cardboard box. No, no - not that one! The one under that one. Or the one under that. I don't know, just start opening boxes - I'll tell you when to stop. Oh, yes, that's right ... I have a fourth wall. Hello, then. What are we doing? Thanks for asking. We are digging through the Big Green archives again. And when I say "archives", I'm talking about something that's really much more rudimentary than that term suggests. Call it a series of boxes, some of which have the Kellogg rooster emblazoned on their side. Then there's those round Quaker Oats boxes .... I used to make pretend ham radios out of those. What we're searching for is, well, some ideas for this year's Christmas pageant extravaganza. Amazingly, there's a lot of holiday material that hasn't been released or even heard for the last ten years. Matt did, what, ten years of Christmas tapes, between 1986 and 1995, with one added on after tha

With an environmental disaster underway in Houston and massive destruction in the Florida Keys, the Virgin Islands, and elsewhere around the Caribbean, it's fair to say that the 2017 hurricane season is off to an inauspicious start. We are completely unprepared for these climate change-fueled super storms, largely because we find ourselves unable to grapple with the fact that global warming is actually happening. Yes, I know - no storm can be directly attributed to climate change, but it does enhance the strength and volatility of the storms to a significant degree, and the effects are very much as predicted by climate scientists. There are people in this country - coastal urban mayors and the like - who have to face facts on this issue, but pretty much everyone else is free to ignore the obvious: that we are now living in a far more dangerous and unstable environment, and it's only going to get worse. The longer we play this denial game and pretend it doesn't exist, the

You sent it up the chute already? Okay, then ... well ... I WAS going to put the good stuff into it first, but I guess it's been long enough that people will settle for whatever they get. Oh, well ... maybe next month. Yes, you heard right - we've uploaded the September 2017 installment of THIS IS BIG GREEN , and this seems like a really good time to talk about what's inside that honking little MP3 file. Here goes: Ned Trek 33: The Nimrod Seven . Incredibly, the thirty-third episode of our Star Trek parody, Ned Trek. This one's based on the classic Star Trek first season episode entitled The Galileo 7 , in which Spock, McCoy, Scotty, and some toss-aways get their shuttlecraft stranded on a hostile ape-infested planet. Well, replace those three regulars with Perle, Coburn, and Sulu, change the shuttlecraft's name to "The Nimrod 7", then throw in Seb Gorka, Peter Lorre, the Nixon android, and a Mr. Stephanie or six and you've got a poorly-wrought m

It's a little hard to sort out what to write about this week. The catastrophic hurricane that hit Texas or the one that's bearing down on Florida? North Korea? DACA? What the hell ... welcome to the Trump era, when everybody drinks from a firehose. What a non-stop freaking joy this administration is. I will leave to more able correspondents (like David Sirota ) the telling of how Trump and the congressional Republicans have worked overtime over the last few months to make east Texas more vulnerable to this kind of disaster. As unprecedentedly powerful storms line up to cause havoc around the Caribbean and up the coast, no doubt the climate change deniers will continue to strip away what little protection people have from flooding, the release of pollutants, and bankruptcy (particularly in a place like Puerto Rico). Then there's North Korea. Perhaps the most remarkable piece of this crisis is the total lack of voices in favor of doing the right thing. From the various talk

This tape recorder has that Leroy Brown kind of problem. You know ... it looks like a jigsaw puzzle with a couple of pieces gone. Guess it must have been messin' with the wife of a jealous dehumidifier. All right, well, it's no secret that Big Green has a technology problem or two, even with an in-house mad science advisor like Mitch Macaphee. Our machines are aging, our circuits are frayed, our relays are frosted, and the electric bill's unpaid. (That was an accidental rhyme, by the way.) Most of our recording devices have at least one tooth missing. I've got an Evil Twin direct box that needs surgery. Our VS2480 deck has finally been retired for a system that's maybe six years newer (i.e. only nine years old). Hey ... if you're a real band, that shouldn't matter, right? Got a second-hand guitar and a panama hat? Start busking. Got a broken-down upright piano that's barely upright? Grab a tin cup and start pounding those dusty keys. That's the