Hammer Mill Days

Is this the Boise office? It ain't? Well then, who the hell is this, anyways? Okay, okay, get me Washington. Huh? Since when? Never mind, then... get me Lincoln. What... him too ? Jeezus.... Oh, it's you. Just try to get somebody on the phone these days! I mean, you'd think with all the portables and the VoIP and all that, it'd be easy... but nooooo . Actually, I've been trying to reach our rep over at Loathsome Prick Records - not the annoying PR guy who puts words in my mouth, but the A&R guy who takes money out of our pockets.... that guy. Wired up like a freaking christmas tree, he is. Never seen so many bleeding lights on something that wasn't a tractor-trailer. (So much for the colorful asides.) Been dialing long distance all morning and so far no luck. It's almost like they don't want to talk to us. And no, I'm not using the royal "we", nor is there a mouse in my pocket. When I call someone, it's on behalf of all of us. (P...

We're just a few months into the new congress, and it's becoming clear that the Democratic leadership doesn't have the stomach for stopping the war in Iraq. This week the Senate failed to pass a pretty flimsy measure calling for a full withdrawal (on good news) by sometime in 2008 - not exactly good news for those shipping out to Iraq for a third or fourth tour of duty. There are many reasons for this continuing failure, but prominent among them is the Democratic leadership's fear of appearing as though they don't fully "support the troops." For chrissake - how much effort does it take to knock that straw man over? Voting for funds to send soldiers into a bloody catastrophe is not "supporting the troops"; it's killing and maiming the troops. If congress defunds this policy, the Pentagon will have plenty of money to get everyone home safe, of fucking course. And yet they remain unwilling to do what needs to be done... what they were elected...

p> Big Green 's little ditty, the President's Brain is Missing, is now at #51 on Neil Young's Living With War chart . Drop on over and help get us into the top 50. Hey... if we do particularly well with this, we'll chip in on getting Dubya a new brain. Can't hoit.

Aw, tubey... what do you want to go and do that for? Put it down , tubey... put it down . Owwww! Not there — that's my freaking skull, you cruciferous moron! Ah, yes... there you are. Welcome. As you can see by the banner head (oh, say, can you see the banner head?), your belov'd "Notes from Sri Lanka" has been re-christened (or more properly speaking, re-agnosticized) "Hammer Mill Days" — just one component in our year-long rebranding project. Ahem ... did I just say that? Can't have been me. I must have been channeling our publicist from Loathsome Prick records — the one who keeps insisting that we re-brand ourselves as some kind of contemporary country or aging emo band (yuk!). Fucker put one of those Bluetooth antennae in my head while I was sleeping, so every once in a while I pop out with his latest PR drivel. Just to keep you straight on who's saying what, I'll just put all the publicist's words in some other color... like maroon, sa...

It was another one of those discouraging weeks in Iraq — you know the type. Bombs going off. People dying in large numbers. Very... well... dis cour aging. But far be it from our leaders to become discouraged with the project itself. And no, I don't mean this project they call "Middle East democracy", because that's just some policy hack yammering. I mean the real Iraq project involving permanent U.S. bases in country and an Iraqi government compliant with (or at least sensitive to) our wishes. Something tells me that project will withstand a good many setbacks of the type that involve loss of life and limb, so long as those lives and limbs belong only to the relatively poor and poorly connected. It was with this goal in mind that our leaders insisted on starting this disastrous war back in March 2003, and if they've shown an element of regret over that decision during the last four years, I've missed it. Actually, the "project" was dealt a minor ...

Aw, c'mon Mitch! You've got at least three electron microscopes to your name. Can't we just use one of them for our experiment? One little one? Damn these scientists and their ethical codes of conduct! Yes, that's right — I did indeed make reference to ethics and Mitch Macaphee in the same sentence. Far be it from me to ever suggest that our resident mad doctor (or as you say, " daktari ") has constrained himself to purely ethical behavior through the course of his long and spotted career. No, no — I'm referring to this annoying internal code that scientists maintain between one another. It's kind of like a secret handshake. In fact, with respect to Mitch and Trevor James Constable (another member of the scientific contingent here at the Cheney Hammer Mill), it is a secret handshake. (Honest — they really will not let us watch them shake hands . It's kind of... unnatural...) Why do we want to play with the shiny, pretty, candy-like electron micros...

In their efforts to paper over a catastrophe, the Bush administration (and Iraq war supporters in general) are beginning to look like Saddam's old press spokesman, "Comical" Ali, who steadfastly denied the advance of U.S. troops to Baghdad in 2003 when his audience could easily see American tanks in the street behind him. There's a P.R. hero for you. Bush really needs that guy! All he's got is his lame cousin Tony Snow, his even lamer "uncle" Dick Cheney, and the ever faithful bride of Frankenstein, Laura, who opined to Larry King recently that things are going not too badly in Iraq except for that one bombing that discourages everyone. I think she may have meant to use another word that begins with "dis", like "dismembers". In any case, all this minimizing does have some effect. Some recent polling shows that large numbers of Americans have no even semi-realistic notion of how many Iraqis have been killed since we unilaterally decide...