Hammer Mill Days

No, there's nothing wrong with it whatsoever. Since when are you a musical purist? I'm experimenting, man ... that's where it's at, right? That's what Big Green is all about. THAT'S WHY WE'RE ABOARD HER ... Oh. sorry ... I lapsed into James T. Kirk dialogue for a moment. We were just having a little back and forth over some musical contrivances I've been attempting on our latest crop of NED TREK songs. Last count we've got fully eight numbers in the works - an unusually large parcel, though our recording process has taken a bit longer than has been our habit in recent years. As some of you know, we used to take some pains over our albums (e.g. International House , five years in the making). Then when we launched our podcast, we started slapping songs together in hours rather than days or months (e.g. Cowboy Scat , a ridiculously slap-dash effort). Well, the pendulum has begun to swing back in the other direction. I think we've put about six...

I would be remiss not to comment, first of all, on the style and delivery of Trump's second State Of The Union address this past Tuesday night. Plainly, he is terrible at reading from a teleprompter. I don't know whether it's a vision issue or some pathology further back in that thick skull of his, but man goddamn, what a horrible read. Beyond that, though, he obviously did not rehearse the speech to any significant degree. It was a rocky road, prosody-wise, for little lord Trump-leroy from beginning to end. An embarrassing performance all around. As for the content, just a couple of points: Immigration. Beyond the same lies, distortions, and barely concealed bigotry that usually erupt from his festering maw, Trump used the well-worn SOTU practice of using guests as rhetorical human shields in his argument for the Wall, greater immigration enforcement, and so on. This time it was family members of a U.S. citizen victim murdered by an MS13 member. Of course, Trump could...