Hammer Mill Days

Where's the list? Damned if I know. It's somewhere in the forge room, I think, under a mountain of iron filings. Well, you TOLD me to file it! Jesus. Yeah, looks like I blew it again. So what's new? We were compiling a list of Big Green songs we've written and at least cursorily recorded since our last CD release - Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick - some six years ago. Lot of water gone under the bridge since then, and a lot of music along with it. It's almost like there was a little boat all loaded down with songs, and the water carried it under the bridge. Along with, well, a lot more water. Or something like that. Of course, this is a list of all of the songs we've written and recorded for the Ned Trek portion of our THIS IS BIG GREEN podcast . There are about 70 or 80 of them, all tolled. So if we decide to release another album, it will either (a) have 70 or 80 songs on it, or (b) be the product of a sane mind. Or maybe it's two or even three

Brazil's fraudulently elected president Jair Balsonaro visited with the marginally less detestable Donald Trump this past week - a reported love fest in which Trump not only announced Brazil's new status as a "non-NATO ally" (which means lots more weapons for Balsonaro to use against his own people) but breezily suggested elevating Brazil to full NATO membership .... which is a little strange, and may have taken Trump's advisors somewhat by surprise. The two pretenders also discussed the ongoing U.S. attack on Venezuela, which Balsonaro is happy to join in on. Of course, that would only make him like most of our political class here at home, which has openly supported the coup attempt by right-wing Venezuelan politician Juan Guaido ... as have much of our corporate media. Just to single out a particularly egregious recent example, NPR's insipid Morning Edition ran a piece by one-time journalist Phillip Reeves about the crisis in Venezuela . The framing of t