Hammer Mill Days

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