Hammer Mill Days

Man, it gets cold out here at night, even in August. This place needs windows. I don't mean the open kind ... I mean the kind that close . You know ... with glass and everything. Yes, I'm still sleeping out here in the shack that stands crookedly in the courtyard of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our lowly squathouse here in upstate New York. This kind of reminds me of the old days, when we had that two-room lean-to in Sri Lanka. What was that like? Well, it was a lot like this. Except warmer. Ah, things were different then. A stiff wind would blow the whole house down, for one thing. And the air was filled with song. (I won't say which song, but frankly, it wasn't one of my personal favorites.) I've taken this opportunity to redecorate in here, you know ... put up a little wall paper. Very little. Because of our lack of budget, of course, I have to use existing materials. But you make the best of what you have, right? And what I have is old set lists and so...

Our friends the Saudis are planning to execute a woman for being a dissident. It's a little hard to imagine how you can be a woman in Saudi Arabia and NOT be considered a dissident, but there you have it. The method will be beheading, which, as I recall, Trump decried furiously during the 2016 campaign as an aberrant ISIS tactic drawn from the middle ages - no one has seen this in centuries! Actually, it's the preferred method of execution in one of your favorite dictatorships, Mr. Trump. Still, it's hard to blame the president for this relationship; we've been cozy with the Kingdom for decades, regardless of what they do, often bending our own foreign policy to suit their tastes (as long as it remains within the narrow limits of our own imperial policies). Why? Is it just oil? Well, that's a complicated issue. Sure, Saudi Arabia wouldn't have been the center of attention for so long if their chief export had been nutmeg. Their ample supply of easy-to-extract,...