Hammer Mill Days

I know I dropped it around here somewhere. Marvin, have you seen it? What's that? Oh, right ... I dropped it on the internets. How could I forget? Yes, well ... we FINALLY got around to dropping a new episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN, featuring Ned Trek 31: It's a Profitable Life. Yes, it's a Christmas special, so think of it as that fruitcake you never opened in December, shoved to the back of the fridge, and you happen upon it one cold February morning - a happy accident! Except that, well ... it's a fruitcake. So, like it or not, here's what you'll find alongside the pecans and candied fruit: Ned Trek 31: It's a Profitable Life - Our parody of "It's a Wonderful Life" as played by your favorite Ned Trek characters: Captain Willard Mittilius Romney in the James Stewart role; Peter Lorre as the angel- (or, rather, devil- )in-training (Gladston Goodstein); Paul Ryan sitting in for the main character's younger brother; Bernie Sanders as the b...

How did you spend that prime time hour this past Tuesday night? I will admit to watching the entire Trump address to a Joint Session of Congress, and I have to say ... it's evident he hired a speechwriter sometime over the past six weeks. His inaugural was a patchwork hodgepodge of paranoid tropes and random utterances, crudely constructed by the likes of Miller and Bannon with some input, most likely, form Trump's demon spawn. Wednesday's speech was full of craven ideas and scapegoating, but it was comparatively well-crafted. Someone massaged the prose a bit, inserted some lofty rhetoric and clever turns of phrase. I think that accounts in large measure for the "tone" difference TV commentators have been crowing about ever since. And the substance of the king's speech? Nauseating, in my humble opinion. The truly low points for me were the jingoistic celebration of the widow of that Navy Seal killed in that botched Yemen raid, the announcement of a special H...