Hammer Mill Days

I spy with my little eye …. a table! No, that’s a chair. No, that’s Mitch Macaphee’s experimental water bong. Yes, yes, finally …. that’s a table. It’s only the last object in the room, for crying out loud. Jesus. Do you know any OTHER games? Here’s the problem with personal robot assistants: they don’t have deep cultural knowledge about what it’s like to be a human being. I mean, Marvin isn’t even programmed to play I Spy. What the hell was Mitch Macaphee thinking when he left that tidbit out of the poor bastard’s memory bank? Beats me how he can be expected to make his way through the world without knowing classic parlor games or learning how to square dance. (And no, Marvin doesn’t know how to doe – see – doe.) Time on our hands Now, the more industrious amongst you will no doubt surmise that, if we are playing parlor games, we have little better to do. As nasty and condescending as that claim obviously is, it’s also just as obviously true. Yes, damn it, a...

I’ve probably told this story once or twice, but I’ll tell it again for good measure. Back in 1980 I was a student at S.U.N.Y. New Paltz and during the course of that year I had the opportunity to hear Stokely Carmichael speak on campus. He shared the stage with a Palestinian activist – sadly, I do not recall who that person was. In any case, a goodly portion of their talk centered on Israel/Palestine and the Palestinian liberation struggle. There were several middle-aged people in the audience that day who challenged the speakers on Israel/Palestine. I can’t say that I recall the exact wording of some of the challenges, but one question they put forward – not an uncommon one at that time – was that with over a dozen Arab countries in the region, why isn’t there room for one Jewish state? This and their other questions were not going over well in the room, which was packed with students. At one point one of the middle aged men referenced the holocaust, and Stokely’s ...