Hammer Mill Days

No, I haven't seen your bass drum case. What do I look like, some kind of servant? By the way, where's my line mixer? What ? No... actually, you don't look like a servant. Why do you ask? Oh, sorry, friends. Just trying to get ahead of things here at the Cheney Hammer Mill. We've got that Aldebaran gig moving up on us fast - sure, sure, the date hasn't been set yet, but we've still got to be ready to go at a moment's notice. What the hell, it's 65 light years away for chrissake, plus or minus. So if our friends over at Loathsome Prick Records call us tomorrow and say the gig is next Thursday, we're going to need every minute. (Every single minute. No doubles, just singles.) And that's just the travel time. We're also going to need to give our mad science adviser, Mitch Macaphee, a brief interval to invent some means of getting us up there. What about our various space crafts, you ask? The ones that have carried so far and so faithfully o...

"This isn't 1968." That was Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice just before embarking on her diplomatic mission to Georgia (the Republic of), to carry a cease fire agreement and presumably get a first-hand look at the smoldering ruins of yet another brilliant foreign policy initiative, this time played out in the region of her supposed expertise. If she was at all aware of the irony in her statement, she certainly gave no hint of it. She was, of course, referring to the USSR's invasion of Czechoslovakia (a country still very much in John McCain's world atlas) as a means of calling out Russia on its brutal violation of a neighboring nation's sovereignty. In her eagerness to link present-day Russia with the Soviet invasion of four decades ago, she appears to have forgotten somewhat more recent history... like her own administration's invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and subsequent occupation of both countries; like the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraq...

Well, we managed to pull the Bill O'Reilly sound-alike tirade off the audio. But the logo... oh, the logo... Glad you could make it back. (Back where ?) Still hanging in there at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, just me and the fellows. And robots. And root vegetables. And mad scientists. And wayward planets. Shall I go on? Perhaps not. Anyway, when last you checked in, we were hammering out the details of our record release. Not such a difficult task, you may have supposed, inasmuch as we live in a hammer mill. Sadly, this was not the case. Our label's law firm - Hegemonic Legal Services and Worm Farm, Inc. - is pretty well checked out on entertainment law, being as they are a subsidiary of our old corporate label, Hegemonic Records and Worm Farm (or "Hegephonic" as they came to be known). They know the ropes. And they know how to use them. What went wrong? Couple of things. First of all, our legal representation was handled by two artificially recovered denizens of...

Looking for something to take your mind off the media marathon they call the Olympic Games? I know I am. Never been big on sports, frankly - I just can't get interested enough, particularly in the win/lose part of it all. Anyway, if you're like me and constitutionally disinclined to sit in front of the television hour after hour watching athletes run, hop, swim, or do something with a ball, join me in thinking about a few other things this weekend and beyond. Stuff like: The Cheney War Plan - Sy Hersh said last week that one of his sources related a story to him about some high-level planning meeting regarding how to get up a war with Iran. According to this source, Cheney was fond of a scheme to assemble a small fleet of bogus Iranian PT boats, man them with disguised Navy Seals, and have them fire on U.S. vessels in the Straits of Hormuz, thereby provoking a kind of Gulf of Tonkin incident (except even more contrived than the original). This brought two things to mind. Fir...

Where do we sign again? Here? Right.... Now, we're done. We're not done? Freaking hell! You've already got our signatures sixty-seven times. Just copy the fuckers. Everything by the book, that's how these legal types are. Anyway... greetings and welcome to Big Green -land. We're finalizing the terms of our forthcoming CD release (actually, it's our second -coming release... we've got two more to go before we get to our fourth) entitled International House , and it's important to get all the details straight. Except when it comes to really shmeensy details of the sort lawyers love to dive into. (They're like hippos who joined a flee circus and are trying to dive into the little swimming pool.) Appendix this and codicil that; refer to paragraph 97, section vii; subsection 7a; insofar as the party of the second part shall render unto the party of the first part said sums as designated in paragraph 43 .... Damn! I'll tell you, it's all we musi...

In case the power's been off in your neighborhood this week, I should mention that the first American war crimes tribunal since the end of World War II has been in session. Who's the first accused war criminal to take the stand, the Herman Goering of the global war on terror? Well, it's some dude who drove Bin Laden's car. Or so they say. Actually, the evidence about that is a little thin, and some of that is testimony extracted under torture (or "enhanced interrogation techniques" as the dark comedians of the Bush administration term it). Another problem: a lot of the folks at Gitmo (Hamdan included) were handed over by surrogates in exchange for a bounty, so you tend to get a high error rate on your collars (e.g. a lot of people who owed a neighbor money or just got on the wrong side of somebody). Happily, the tribunal doesn't rely on the same standard of evidence as one might expect in, say, a mainland American court of law. I suspect many of these cas...

What do you suggest we do, Gertrude? What's done is done, right? What? No, no... that's not an option. Besides... he's too old to be any good in a stew. Bound to be stringy as hell. Oh, hi, friends (or as John McCain might say, " my friends"). Sorry... I was just on the phone with someone at our label, that vice president of marketing and coercion person. She's all bent out of shape. So are we all, frankly. Yes, that's a metaphor. Though in the case of Marvin (my personal robot assistant), being bent out of shape is a serious matter and one that has been plaguing him since his invention by Mitch Macaphee some few years ago. (Marvin is bent just slightly out of shape, as perhaps you can tell from his photos.) I have to say, I don't like it when people yell at me over the phone. I kind of worry they'll hurt their throats and have to talk like Miles Davis for the rest of their natural lives. (Not that there's anything wrong with that....) Okay.....