Hammer Mill Days

  Note: The following is a partial transcript from an interview with Big Green co-founder Joe Perry. The interviewer was conducted by Marvin (my personal robot assistant). Part one: The first part Marvin: In your early years, Big Green lived in not one, but TWO houses on the same street in Castleton-On-Hudson, NY . WTF were you thinking? JP: Glad you asked me this question, Marvin. (Which is to say, I’m glad I asked your inventor, Mitch Macaphee, to program this question into your tiny brass skull.) The answer is, I haven’t a freaking clue. All I know is that the two houses were next door to one another. One of them had a claw-foot tub. The other had holes in the porch roof. Am I getting warmer? Marvin: We all are getting warmer, due to climate change. Moving on. Big Green has released three studio albums thus far, the most recent being Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick (2013). And though all three are of questionable value, Cowboy Scat is by far...

Here we go again. Cases are rising, as are hospitalizations and deaths. This COVID-19 catastrophe – the Trump Plague, as I like to call it – is not going away anytime soon. Why the hell is this happening? I think we all know the answer to that. From the beginning, Trump and his allies played down the seriousness of this illness. The Republican Party and the right more generally have made a political football out of vaccination and wearing PPE. As a result, only a little more than half of Americans are fully vaccinated. The miracle that wasn’t Cast your mind back to fourteen months ago. Everything shut down, people were panic-buying toilet paper, etc. – you remember the drill. If someone had told you then that there would be not one, not two, but three highly effective vaccines available within a year, would you have believed it? Perhaps. But what if they had told you that many millions of Americans would refuse to take it? I, myself, would have thought that was ...