Hammer Mill Days

Lesson one: if you find yourself staked out in an abandoned hammer mill with your bandmates, never... never let your resident mad scientist work unattended. Negative consequences will be had. What do I mean, specifically? Just try it and find out! Yes, you aspiring bands out there... get yourself a mill and a madman, shake vigorously, and wait until it starts to fizz. Then you will have your answer. In our case, we didn't even need the vigorous shaking. Our resident mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, sort of shakes himself up. You may recall that last week he had taken up a new hobby - sculpting. We of Big Green thought little of this... our cohorts are always trying new things, starting new trends, discovering new interests. (Like the man-sized tuber and his harmonica playing. Or John and his anti-matter bicycle collection. Or me and my cucumber sandwich juggling.) But soon we noticed some disturbing signs that Mitch was perhaps taking his new thing (or " thang ") a l...

Had to kind of shake my head a few times this week at the thought that Robert Kennedy's assassination was 40 years ago. I mostly remember the morning after he died of his wounds, more than a day after the actual shooting, I woke to the sight of my mom pulling the Kennedy bumper sticker off my bedroom door, her grave expression rendering the news superfluous. A sliver of the sticker remained on that door for some time. Nasty days indeed. So are these, of course, only the pain seems more concentrated in the lower echelons of society than it was in 1968, as polarized as we were in those days. Today, only volunteers are sent to war, and they are drawn overwhelmingly from the working class and poor... so a needless war like the one we started in Iraq can grind on year after year without any sign of ending, just arrogant squawkery about how much more successfully the enterprise is proceeding. Likewise, income inequality is now so extreme that those with the greatest insecurity are hobble...

Look at that. Chip off the old block, eh, Mitch? You should be proud, very proud. You are ? Good, good. (Arrogant sonofabitch...) Whoops . Didn't know I was typing my thoughts as well as my spoken words - very careless of me. Do me a kindness and overlook that last remark... I'm just not in a very good state of mind right now vis-a-vis Mitch Macaphee, our resident mad scientist. Truth be known, he's not arrogant. The son of a bitch part is fairly accurate, but I wouldn't call him arrogant. Stubborn, perhaps. Okay, okay - obstinate. But not arrogant. And I am trying to hold my tongue around him, as it took a good long time to convince him to return to the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. Wouldn't want to be responsible for sending him packing once again. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) would never let me hear the end of it. (A devoted son, it seems.) Why am I annoyed at Mitch? Well.... I'm told I'm being unfair. After all, it was he who ultimately shifted ...

There was a lot of noise this week about Iran once again, this in the wake of an IAEA report that raises questions about some aspects of their nuclear program. The occasion prompted appearances on evening news shows of all manner of expert, so long as they share the view that Iran should never, ever be allowed to possess nuclear technology. One "expert" opined that such an eventuality would set off an arms race in the Middle East, prompting Saudi Arabia to get the bomb and so on. Not sure how closely he's been paying attention to his area of expertise, but that train left the station decades ago. Israel has a substantial arsenal of nuclear weapons which, though undeclared, has inspired nuclear development programs in Iraq, perhaps Syria, and yes, Iran, if not elsewhere. That is the elephant in the room - the massive destructive power in the hands of a state that has recently and repeatedly attacked its neighbors, and that regularly threatens Iran with air strikes. This ca...

Want to see me make a donut disappear. Ala-kazam! (*Gulp*) Ta-daaaa! Okay, now... watch me do a half-moon. Presto-change-o ! (*Gulp*) Where'd it go? Where'd it go? Next... Oh, hello. (urp.) Glad you could surf by. I suppose you might be asking yourself, What the fuck is he doing now? Well, friends.... "what the fuck" indeed. The things I have to do to keep people on board with this pointless venture of ours! (Yes, yes... we keep losing people to other unrelated pointless gestures - it's very discouraging.) You may recall that sometime last week, in our despair over the water table having been depleted by the man-sized tuber's thirsty relatives, we began digging makeshift wells in the cobblestone courtyard of the Cheney Hammer Mill. And, having run into some (predictable) difficulties with that endeavor, we resolved to employ some kind of hacked-together magic to make our well-holes - this seeming a more immediate course of action than waiting seven years fo...

Mercifully, I have a short drive to just about anywhere I'm likely to go. My day job is minutes away, my mom lives across the street, my sisters the next street over... in fact, none of my immediate relatives live more than 15 or 20 miles away, and they all work within spitting distance of where I live. Both of my wife's and my vehicles, while ancient, are four-cylinder sedans, only one of which we drive with any regularity. If we clock 5,000 miles in a year's time, that's a lot for us, so I'm filling the tank of my '93 Accord probably once every two weeks. A year ago, that cost around $30; now it's $40 or so - manageable, thus far. But these precipitous price increases on gasoline are killing most people I know (and most of those I don't know), and there appears no end in sight. It would be bad enough if it just hit you at the gas pump, but it affects everything else as well. The food you buy, the employer you work for, the community you live in - every...

Okay, boys - let's dig a bit deeper. Matt, it's your turn with the post-holer. Marvin (my personal robot assistant), you've got the pick axe this time. I'll occupy myself with this dime novel. (KLANG!) Oowwww!!! Dissent in the ranks. Happens every time you try to get some work out of this crew. Though telling Matt to dig is kind of like bossing your boss around. (He euphemistically directed me to engage in autosex with myself. I, of course, refused.) Still, you would think Marvin, at least, would do what I ask, and yet he's worse than most of the others, tossing his tools into the drainage ditch, muttering to himself in that robotian way of his. He's still surly over the space robot Dextre thing - another obsession that, thus far, Mitch Macaphee has been unable to program out of the poor boy. For his own part (and don't ask which part I'm referring to), Mitch has been keeping far away from the work zone as well. Not that I would expect him to use those m...