Hammer Mill Days

Hey, wait ... isn't it my turn? No? What the hell - you just had it. I'm not going to listen to another of your drunken yarns, you ne'er do well. Jesus, what a stupid tradition. Let's start over. Oh, hi. Well, since we're living so close to the ground these days, an almost traditional life style you might say, we've decided to take on some of the old practices, just to keep in step with our new way of living. Not sure what ancient peoples dwelt in potting sheds ... perhaps there was a Potsylvania after all. (Jay Ward may have been onto something!) Nevertheless, we thought it might make the time go by a bit faster to appropriate some old traditions that we'd seen on TV at some point. One was the talking stick. You know how it works, right? Whoever has the stick can speak to the group, tell a tale, reveal a secret, cop to a fault or instance of wrongdoing, etc. Then they pass it along. Or sometimes they don't, and you have to grab it from their ass. Go...

I don't read a lot of books these days, given my lack of personal time, but right now I'm reading a book I think every American should read. It's called Kill Anything That Moves , by Nick Turse, it's a few years old (maybe five or six), and it lays out the systematic slaughter of the U.S. war in Vietnam in sickening detail. Meticulously researched and documented, this book is a really useful guide to archival sources on what was certainly one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century and one that the United States has never come to terms with. Here is a brief excerpt that describes what was done in the American effort to pacify the Binh Dinh region of South Vietnam in 1966: During the six weeks of [Operation] Masher/White Wing, from late January to early March 1966, the 1st Cavalry Division fired 133,191 artillery rounds in to Binh Din's heavily populated An Lao Valley and Bong Son Plain. The navy added 3,213 rounds from its ships. The air force launched ...