Hammer Mill Days

On the first day of something my something gave to me … something, something, something, blah, blah blah blah blah, five golden … things ! Arrgh. Leave us face it. For a band that began its recording career with what was ostensibly a Christmas album, we are terrible at remembering even the most oft-repeated holiday songs. Someone – I think it was Marvin (my personal robot assistant) – once suggested caroling around the neighborhood on Christmas eve, hoping for some charitable cast-offs and crusts of festive breads, but when you glom over too many lyrics, you lose credibility as a caroler and instead of handing foodstuffs to you, your audiences tend to throw them at you with some force. Personally, when it comes to seasonal pastimes, I prefer the ones that don’t involve serious festive injuries and having steaming vats of hot holiday cheer poured on us from second-story windows. Call me Scrooge. We don’t have any really strong holiday traditions. Probably the most endu...

Impeachment is now officially under way. That’s not what I’ll write about today, however, because you are most likely hearing about that absolutely everywhere else, and I have little or nothing to add to what’s being said elsewhere. Today I’ll opine on the career and slime trail of former NYC mayor Rudy Giuliani, whose evident losing battle with dementia is being televised nightly. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard people ask, what happened to Rudy? The answer is simple: nothing. Like Trump, he’s just as nasty as he ever was, only older and more scrambled. Because of the nature and the timing of the 9/11 attacks, many people remember Giuliani fondly as “America’s Mayor”, I think mostly because he didn’t run up the street screaming when the towers fell. What he was then, of course, was a failed mayor at the end of his term, a man with the blood of many people of color on his hands, and an immensely corruptible individual whom Jimmy Breslin once famously described...