Hammer Mill Days

Skin temperature 500 degrees Kelvin. 550 Kelvin. 600 Kelvin. Damage report! Skin temperature 750 Kelvin. Pilot to co-pilot - what the hell is "Kelvin" and why is it so damn hot? Oh, yes... hello, blogospheric visitor. You're catching your friends in Big Green at kind of a bad time, actually. I would ask you to come back in about half an hour, but we just may have all been burned to a cinder by that time. So... now's better. You may ask yourself, why is this band always chin-deep in some kind of unlikely peril, rather than wired to a mixing console, turning the pots and making the record you've been promised for the last four years? I have an answer to that, I'm fairly sure, only it's back on the surface of the Earth, where we are headed at approximately 575 miles per hour, through ever-thickening layers of atmosphere, like riding a matchhead over an enormous striker. Hot, baby, hot! Not that you need a lot of back story (just look below, or click the ...

The Palestinian's two main political factions are on the brink of all-out civil war - the first such fratricidal conflict in that unfortunate people's modern history. How the Israeli leadership must be chortling right now. To them, this is a dream come true - at long last, Palestinians are killing one another. Forty years into the illegal occupation of the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem (not to mention the Syrian Golan, still illegally occupied), the imperial tactic of divide and conquer is finally paying dividends. Back in the 1980s, when the first intifada was brewing, Israeli intelligence made an investment in the then-nascent Hamas movement, hoping that it would undercut Fatah in the occupied territories. Of course, the intifada made Arafat's organization, then in exile in Tunis, far less relevant, as resistance was driven by Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, not in the diaspora. That was when Hamas began to take hold as a political force, providing social se...

Auckland, do you read me. Come in, Brazzaville, come in . Are you receiving me, Des Moines? Is there anybody out there, for chrissake? Well, now we've done it. Golsh dang-git. I mean, god damn it... I may as well swear again, since Gizmandiar and his entire extraterrestrial junta may well have been atomized by deadly keltone rays, fired at city hall by our somewhat intemperate sit-in guitarist from Zenon, sFshzenKlyrn . What the fuck... if only that were the end of it. As many of you know, we called sFshzenKlyrn in to help us deal with these foul usurpers, who had deprived of us squathouse, livelihood, and even language. And as I may have mentioned before, our Zenite friend is a little hard to stop once he gets going. And friends, old sFshzenKlyrn got going all right. He certainly hasn't lost his touch with concentrated trans-dimensional matter disruption beams. Okay, here's what happened, judge. First the man from Zenon smashed city hall to smithereens. Gizmandiar had e...

It's only June and we're deep into presidential debate season. Did I get my years wrong? I thought this was 2007, not 2008. Fuck a duck, we've already got close to 20 presidential contenders hurling platitudes at us and competing over who can be the biggest caveman on camera. I think this week's prize might have to go to G.O.P. longshot congressman Duncan Hunter, who advocated using "tactical nuclear missiles" to destroy Iranian centrifuges. (There's a man of conviction!) That'll teach those Iranians to threaten ... people with... nuclear ... weapons.... (irony). Christ, they'll probably kick up their uranium enrichment just on the basis of his little demagogic tirade. Then there's the god-stakes, which was a bit more of a laugh than usual since the very same day I heard a political commentator on NPR opining that the Republican candidates were shying away from openly religious rhetoric to distance themselves from Dubya. Right on the money once...

Don't tell me - let me guess. It's big. It's dense. And it's very, very attractive. Ummmmm... that could be almost anything that fits those criteria. Am I getting warmer? Well, am I? Crikey. Sometimes Marvin (my personal robot assistant) takes his programming far too seriously. I've asked him to help me with a little problem I'm trying to work out... namely, what inhabitable planets can we sail off to in case the titanic struggle between sFshzenKlyrn (trans-physical etheric energy being from Zenon) and Gizmandiar (lawn-obsessed, power-mad space creature now occupying the seat of our local government) renders the earth un inhabitable for a brief time (perhaps six or seven million years... which passes quickly if you are made of feldspar). Matt heard recently that the astronomical community has identified another 28 planets circling distant stars they've observed, and I'm sure at least one of them has our name written on it. If I can just get Marvin to ...

Clinging to their precious terror war, the Bush administration now cannot stop talking about al Qaeda, as if Bin Laden were running a kind of Wal*Mart of terror as opposed to serving as inspiration to hundreds and perhaps thousands of self- directed extremist organizations. It's the last rhetorical refuge for a president who has lost the support of the vast majority of his countrymen and is now hunkering down to ride out the last 18 months of a particularly septic tenure. If we leave Iraq, Bush cautions us, we will be hit again. What he doesn't tell us is, if we stay, we are just as likely to be hit again, if not more so, thanks to his war in Iraq, which has spawned a new generation of terrorists and significantly destabilized a region already boiling with hatred and injustice. Alas, there is no "undo" button on this war, which is why so many of us opposed it most strenuously before its start. We have set into motion a catastrophe the repercussions of which will be w...

I know, I know. I shouldn't-a dunit. But I dunit. They left me no alternative. Do I suck? Maybe. But at least you know where I stand. (Am I standing? Feels like sitting...) Howdy, friends. Expect you recall last week's tiresome debacle and the intolerable acts of our extraterrestrial overlords, as they came to occupy our humble city hall. Who could forget the arrogance of a certain Gizmandiar? A gentleman he is not. (Neither gentle, nor man... nor any other species I've ever come across.) I am not being ungenerous. Consider, if you will, the bill of particulars with regard to said Gizmandiar . He and his minions hath: deliberately and wantonly, with malice aforethought, driven us from our ancestral (relax - that's just the paint color) home and consigned us to a life of enhanced beggary (that's like the beggary we enjoyed previously, only with 65% more cat's pee); issued the intolerable and wholly despicable decree known as "Special Order 14-2007" w...