Hammer Mill Days

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...