Hammer Mill Days

  Is this thing on? What? I think you’re muted, man. Yeah …. the little audio symbol has a cross-out graphic superimposed on it. Huh. Funny how that works. Oh, hi. Yeah, the century is finally catching up with us … or we’re catching up with it. It’s no secret that we of Big Green tend towards the Luddite side of the ledger. When a visitor asks us to turn the heat up a bit in the Cheney Hammer Mill, we trudge out into the forest looking for dead trees to chop up. When a neighbor asks us for a cup of sugar or a pint of milk, we trudge out into the forest looking for dead trees to chop up. (That’s just something we do when people ask us stuff. Don’t ask me why … or, well, you know what we’ll do.) So, while as a band we were relatively early to the internet and early adopters of MP3 files (as well as early arrivals in the blogosphere), a lot of this newfangled technology is way over our heads. I would ask Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to explain it to me,...

Mitch McConnell and the people he represents (i.e. not so much his Kentucky constituents as mega-donors across the nation) realized their decades-long dream this week – the seating of a sixth hyper-conservative Supreme Court justice who will very likely play an important role in rolling back labor rights, voting rights, the regulatory power of federal agencies, reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and much more in the decades to come. Stick a fork in it: the Supreme Court is now locked down by reactionaries for the foreseeable future, thanks to the determination and ruthlessness of the Republicans and the lack of focus and passion on the part of Democrats. We had three major electoral opportunities to regain control of the Court since 2000, and we blew every one of them, and now we’ll have to deal with the consequences. Readers of this blog and listeners to my podcast, Strange Sound , will know that I grew up in a white, suburban, solidly Republican town in upstate New ...