Hammer Mill Days

  There it is again. See it? That white stuff, floating down from the sky to vex us. Why, Lord, why? I only just pulled the tarp off the hole in the roof last Saturday, and now this ! MITCH!! Sorry, folks. Didn’t mean to melt down all over the blog post. It’s this damnable weather that’s got me riled up. Freaking snow, coming down through the sky-wide gap in the roof of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted home. As it that isn’t bad enough, Anti-Lincoln is in the forge room making snowmen …. like a child ! So un-presidential. (Which, I suppose, is to be expected.) Everyone complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. Of course, not everyone can do anything about it, and what makes this April snow particularly frustrating is the knowledge that we have here amongst us someone who actually can control the weather. I’m referring, of course, to our esteemed mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee, who has toyed with atmospheric disturbances ...

It was another one of those moments that will be encoded in our memories, so that people will likely recall long into the future where they were when they heard the news. I know I won’t soon forget the sadness I felt, unexpectedly, when I heard that former police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted on all three counts. As with most important events, I learned about it from a television announcer while I was in another room, doing something else. My eyes started welling up, and I thought about George Floyd somehow looking down on this sorry society of ours from his perch in the afterlife, or his place in our memories, and smiling. I think the repeated replay of his terrible suffering, over and over through the course of the trial, left a mark on a lot of us, and for me it is a source of tremendous sadness to know that he had to endure such an awful death, so unjustly. In the shadow of that horrific act, the conviction is cold comfort, but I am glad that his family no...