Hammer Mill Days

There are a thousand and one practical uses for them, Mitch. You can eat them, for one thing. And if you wire them up right, you can use them as primitive dry cell batteries. That’s two. Just nine hundred ninety-nine to go. Damn, it’s hard to talk a man of mad science into something that doesn’t involve explosions. Here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, we are currently in the midst of an agrarian revolution. We’re feeling our roots here in rural upstate New York. Why fight it, Big Green? You are people of the land. You are born of the soil, and you refer to yourselves in the second person. Did I ever tell you my daddy was a poor dirt farmer from up in the hills around Milford? Well, if I did, I was either drunk or more drunk. Dad grew some tomatoes and hot peppers in the backyard, that’s about it. (Oh, and there were those grape vines, but I digress.) Okay, so we DON’T have the soil in our blood. What of it? We are simply living up to the promise implicit in our...

My god, what a depressing week. Our first-in-the-nation presidential electoral contest ended in a train wreck, when the brainchild of Democratic Party operatives managed to turn the already chaotic Iowa Caucuses into a failed experiment in participatory democracy via digital technology. While it’s not clear exactly what went wrong with regard to the Shadow app, what is clear is the fact that the party officials and app developers did not adequately test their reporting system before the day of the caucuses. I’ve heard stories of technical problems, user errors, poor training, inadequate support, poorly staffed phone banks (which was, essentially, the traditional means by which results were reported in previous election years), etc. What I HAVEN’T heard is someone saying, “it was my damn fault.” What was worse was that, days later, we still didn’t have the full results. When I looked Wednesday afternoon, only 75% of the results were in. That night it got up to 92%, the n...