Hammer Mill Days

  I was starting to wonder about you. Did they put you in with other robots? Huh. That’s funny. I thought they had a special section for automatons. What is law enforcement coming to, for crying out loud? Hi, Big Green fans. It’s your old friends Big Green, still living together, like most bands do, in the same shabby domicile. Not accomplishing much these days, frankly – just trying to keep the heat out and dancing on the rubble. Sometimes we spin a record or play a tape . Occasionally we record something. It’s a slow life, but an honest one …. honestly asinine. Name and a face I was just getting a debriefing from Marvin (my personal robot assistant) on his latest expedition to the corner store. This time it took him fourteen hours, thirty-seven minutes, and twelve seconds. (No, I wasn’t timing him – he has a digital chronometer built into his face plate.) Last time he was a few minutes quicker, but that was the day his battery ran out. Speaking of facepl

Once in a somewhat long while, there are those moments when the forces that animate our society can’t help but reveal themselves. The late Alexander Cockburn once described it as being like turning on the kitchen light in the middle of the night and seeing all the cockroaches before they scatter. It’s a bit like that. The epic fail of the Afghanistan adventure is one of those. The Taliban has been running the country for a little over a week, and what are we hearing? That a third of the country lives in abject poverty and half of the children are severely malnourished . That, my friends, didn’t happen over the last ten days. Where was that news a month ago? Two months ago? Fifteen years ago? The wrong ordinance In the first glorious year of the reign of Trump the Malodorous, our dear, fat leader made a point of dropping a big bomb on Afghanistan. It was one of those “daisy cutter” bunker-buster type bombs – I did a post about it back in 2017 . This “mother of all