Hammer Mill Days

It can't be morning yet, right? It's still freaking dark outside. What? Oh, right. My night mask. I'll just pull it off and ... OH MY GOD ... IT'S MORNING! Well, that's my revelation for today. What have you got? Hope you're having a great holiday season, whether or not you celebrate any of the various commemorative feast-days that fall sometime around now. Like Trump in the White House, we've been staked out here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill in upstate New York (a.k.a. that farm upstate that every alt band goes to eventually) waiting for someone to tell us it's safe to venture outside without proper shoes. That's right - our shoes are a disgrace, my friends. No bones about it. And when you've got substandard shoes, Spring can't come soon enough. And while we've been cooped up in this drafty old barn, we've tried to busy ourselves with some low-budget Kringle-ing, sending out some old recordings via social media to our gagg...

As you know, this is the week when every news and opinion broadcast, podcast, etc., typically does their year in review. There are, of course, economic reasons for this - they basically run clip shows or pre-taped round tables, which can occasionally be worth watching (Chris Hayes usually does pretty well with these) but are mostly pretty dull and awful. So, inasmuch as this is not, repeat, NOT a news blog or, really, an opinion blog in the traditional sense, I am breaking with this obnoxious practice and running with something I think is more useful .... the century in review. Meaning stuff that happened over the last 100 years, selected at random, and by "stuff" I mean historical and political stories that are, in essence, lost to history, particularly in the United States. One such story is the Iran-Iraq war (1980-88). which I have mentioned previously in the blog over the years. This, in my opinion, is one of those seminal conflicts that set the stage for much that foll...