Hammer Mill Days

Yeah, turn the bass drum up a little in my headphone mix. Yeah, that's enough. That's good. Okay, dial it back ... Too loud. STOP!! Christ on a bike. Can't you turn a knob in a direction other than clockwise? No? Okay. Good to know. As you may have surmised, we have resorted to using Marvin (my personal robot assistant) as a sound engineer in the makeshift studio we maintain at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. Not the optimal choice, I admit, but hey, look - we only have two hands. Actually, between us, we have four, but - and this is important - WE'RE USING ALL FOUR OF THEM. I thought Marvin, being a robot, might be a bit more precise in his manipulations of various sound parameters, but it appears that Mitch Macaphee (our mad science advisor) cut a few corners when he put Marvin together. His wrist joints only turn one way, it turns out. What the fuck. When you are effectively a pop duo ... and I think Matt and I constitute the duo part, at least ... you need to ...

Some election news this week. Jon Ossoff, Democratic party candidate in the Georgia 6th congressional district "jungle" primary topped 48% of the vote tally, which is impressive in Tom Price/Newt Gingrich territory but still a couple of points below an outright victory. As always, the Republicans furiously worked the refs on this race, establishing the easy-bake narrative that Ossoff needed to win an outright maclassjority and that anything short of that would be an abject failure. The mainstream media, of course, adopted this line because it's simple and requires zero analysis (a lot of stories run this way), so the news shows the morning after the election were full of Democrats falling short postmortems. Useful. Okay, because I am at heart a fair person, I will admit that the likes of Joe Scarborough said something that I actually agreed with this past Wednesday - something to the effect that Democrats need to rediscover getting out the vote, knocking on doors, calli...