Hammer Mill Days

Got your bearings straight? Well, then, where the hell are we? What's that? The Bering Strait ? How the hell did we... oh, right. You're just repeating the last two words of every sentence that comes out of my mouth. How helpful. Stop it! Yes, friends... that's right. We still haven't found our way back to the Cheney Hammer Mill, which we now presume is no longer under the control of the dreaded space alien Gizmandiar since his ignominious defeat at the pseudo-pods of the equally dreaded (though beloved by us) space alien sFshzenKlyrn . (Long story, actually. If you've missed the last few installments, click that Usual Rubbish link and scroll down a bit.) Anyway, we spent several salty days at sea following our splashdown in the Atlantic (or was it the Pacific... because the Atlantic isn't so terrific, though the Pacific, I hear, is not all it's cracked up to be...) before Marvin (my personal robot assistant) caught sight of land. It was the first we'd...

A mighty tree has fallen in the Republican foreign policy establishment, senatorial division. Indiana Senator Richard Lugar has publicly broken with Bush's Iraq policy, signaling what may be the leading edge of a much broader exodus amongst rank-and-file G.O.P. lawmakers. Many of these senators and congresspeople are watching the polls and worrying about their prospects for fending off anti-war challengers if this Iraq business doesn't roll to a stop before fall of 2008. Others are probably just sick of hearing about dead and grievously wounded constituents. Dubya, for his part, obviously couldn't care less. In some ways, he's strikingly similar to his predecessor in the White House, at least with respect to his disregard for the health of his party. Oh sure, Bush, Rove, and Tom Delay tried to rig Washington into a G.O.P.-only club, but look where they have brought the party after six years. Pretty much the only thing they have a firm grip on now is the Supreme Court, w...

Every man is the captain of his soul, sure. But what about every robot? And every root vegetable? I mean, how many captains can this unseaworthy scow handle, eh? Cheeez. Ahoy, mateys! Yes, it's your old friends in the calamitous band Big Green shouting out to you from the high seas, somewhere east (or perhaps west) of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill in sunny upstate New York. As you may have surmised, we.... um, excuse me... Hey Matt - ask one of the Lincolns to put his finger up in the air and get a check of our wind direction. No, no - not THAT finger! Mother of pearl.... As I was beginning to say, you have probably surmised that we made it through re-entry okay. A bit touch and go, though it helps to remember that we have had much, much more experience with the terrifying phenomenon of re-entry than practically any rock band in business. (Except perhaps Captured by Robots - they've got us beat, for sure.) Yes, the strange craft we borrowed from Gizmandiar lacked compre...

The "new" Middle East is emerging, and it isn't at all pretty - a child, in fact, that only its mother (the Bush administration) could love. When a massive military presence on main street Ramadi is considered freedom, you know something is dreadfully wrong with this picture. But then freedom is a very malleable word, one that enables scoundrels to sound high-minded while in fact speaking a portion of the grisly truth. "Freedom" may sound like human rights, but what they're really talking about is the freedom to apply power at will. Pirates' freedom, or perhaps more accurately, the freedom of the mafia don. Our standard is clear: a regime loves freedom if it is compliant with our directives. If not, it is radical, dictatorial, extreme. Uri Avnery, the great Israeli peace activist, sums it up quite neatly in a recent column . Palestinians are "moderate" if they follow U.S. orders and "pragmatic" if they follow Israel's orders. Clea...

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...