Hammer Mill Days

For the last time, Mitch, I said no. No , damn it! Isn't it cold enough in upstate New York? And you want to go way the hell out there? Forget it! Ah, right. I'm typing all this as we speak. My apologies - we were just having a band meeting and, well, things were starting to get a little contentious. You see, our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee got it into his head that we should book a performance or two on Ultima Thule , that snowman-shaped object in the Kuiper Belt recently photographed by a NASA space probe. "You'd be the first," he said. "Don't you want to be first in something ?" You see what we have to put up with around here? I mean. Matt and I were just asking for ideas about new venues, new opportunities to connect with a broader audience ... preferably a terrestrial one. That's when Mitch piped up about the planetoid. Sure, we've played planetoids before. But honestly ... you want to go someplace warm during the winter mont...

John Bolton and Mike Pompeo made the rounds of every American president's favorite region this past week, on behalf of their grizzly leader. The press story was that they were explaining the administration's plan for withdrawal from Syria; really, this will be a much more gradual process than the president promised over the holidays to howls of protest from the national security talking heads. Of course, it's a case of Trump doing a potentially positive thing in a really ham-handed fashion and for all the wrong reasons. So naturally he had to walk it back. Not the promise of "The Wall", you understand ... just the more recent promise of total withdrawal from Syria. And partial withdrawal Afghanistan. I'll believe it when I see it. The U.S. presidency has evolved to a point of foreign policy cravenness that pulling all troops out of any conflict, no matter how pointless or long-winded, is simply not an option. And before someone reminds me, yes, we do still h...