Hammer Mill Days

I know it's the dead of summer, but I'm tired of all this drag-and-drop bullshit. Can't we take a break and hang out in the courtyard for an hour or two, sipping cool drinks and listening to some boss tunes? No? Sheesh . Okay, so yes, I'm frittering away my summer in the basement of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, keeping my head down, concentrating on the task before me. What task is that, you may ask? And well you may. Archiving, my friends, archiving. Plowing through decades of audio tape, capturing songs that have never been committed to a hard drive; songs recorded on primitive ribbons of tape, stored away in shoeboxes, and nearly forgotten. Literally hundreds of recordings, the overwhelming majority made by Matt in the privacy of my abandoned bedroom. It's an exhausting undertaking, particularly when you are as work-averse as I am. Still, I've made pretty good progress. I've gotten most of them transferred to digital, and now I'm pruning arou...

This has been a hair-on-fire week in American politics, prompted by Trump's bizarre behavior at his ill-prepared Helsinki summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin. There were calls of treason and shameful behavior in the face of a principal "enemy", "adversary", "foe"... whatever Russia may be in the eyes of mainstream politicians and pundits. You know the facts - Trump, of course, contradicted his intelligence advisors, suggesting that he believes Putin's denials regarding the hack against Democrats in particular and the electoral system in general during the 2016 race. He then walked it back - and I mean this literally - like a five-year-old might; that, of course, was enough for those occasional Republican critics of the president. He misspoke on one phrase ... THAT clears it up. That said, the coverage of this series of incidents has been so over the top it's almost dizzying. Mainstream center-left commentary has portrayed this perfor...