Hammer Mill Days

Don't see it? Well look again. That flaring star. That's the sun... our sun. The sun the earth orbits. Its temperature is so high it can turn this ship's hull to butter... and we're heading straight for it! Yikes... didn't know anyone was listening, there. Just rehearsing my lines for the upcoming Lost In Space favorite episodes playoff. Haven't heard of it? Not surprised. Oh... did you think I was talking about our own interstellar travels just then? Heh heh heh.... No, no. Not a bit of it. The flaring star we're headed straight towards is not the Earth's sun. It's another star, far hotter than our own... a blue dwarf, as it were. And it won't reduce our hull to butter. Oh, no... just vaporize it entirely, along with everything inside. So there's a difference between television melodrama and the real thing, my friends, and don't you forget it. Hollywood is the land of butter hulls. In real life, the term of art is "vaporization...

I had resolved to dedicate my blog rambling to a suggestion list for the incoming Obama administration over these few remaining weeks of the Bush II era. (Suggestion #9 - drop the homophobe preacher.) But sometimes events overtake us... events in the shape of a size ten shoe. Actually, two size ten shoes, tossed quite skillfully at the commander in chief himself, who dodged them - also quite skillfully - much as he's been able (up to this point, at least) to dodge responsibility for the mass death and destruction he has brought down upon Iraq. This was for the widows and orphans and the thousands killed, said Muntazer al-Zaidi as he hummed the second limo at our fearless (or clueless) leader. My first thought was, huh... an anger so pervasive that it was able to penetrate even the octuple security of the Green Zone's inner sanctum and make the president duck. And, as I'm sure someone has observed, it was no lame duck.... quite adept. Makes me wonder if people chuck things a...

What time is it? Say what ? Can't be that yet, can it? Seems like we just got up... and now it's night fall. Oh, right. Small planet. Fast rotation. Got it. Trouble with being on the road is you never know what town you're waking up in. Or what planet. That's bad enough when you have a set itinerary, but with Big Green ... mother of pearl! Even when you've got your wits about you, it's hard to figure out where the hell you're playing. Like this little planetoid Urich our pilot drove us into. It's not on any astronomical charts. It's as yet undiscovered and unacknowledged by the scientific community. So, when we walk out on stage to do a few numbers, what the hell do we shout out to the crowd of hideously misshapen extraterrestrial concert-goers? "Helllooooooooo....... whatever!" Got any suggestions? Let us know, damn it. It's disorienting, and I'm about as disorientated as anyone needs to be. (Except maybe the man-sized tuber... on...

Another segment of suggestions for president-elect Obama as he completes what feels like the longest presidential transition ever. Before I get into that, however, I will briefly join the chorus of people sounding off on Illinois governor Blagojevich and his jaw-dropping, bald-faced, kleptocratic frenzy to fill Obama's senate seat with the ass of the highest bidder. I think of myself as a fairly jaded individual, generally speaking, having trawled through the sludge of American politics most of my life on one level or another (never a very elevated one)... and yet somehow that transcript of Blagojevich saying "this thing is [fucking] golden" struck me as, well, appalling and depressing, even as it made me laugh. Just the sheer mind-numbing greed of it made me think, as Keith Olbermann said the other day, of Zero Mostel in the original movie "The Producers" ... "Oh! I want that money !!" Holy shit. Anyway, back to another Illinois politician of note, a ...

Good Fahrenheit, everybody! What a beautiful backhoe it turned out to be. I was wondering how Australia the wine barrel might get before the trout found its gerund. Forgive me, friends. My brain is addled. I've asked Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to correct my copy from here on in. It's been a long week on the road, let me tell you. Typically I make it to the end with all of my faculties intact, but this was the week we ended up on the mysterious (and as yet undiscovered) planet Neuton. It's a clever little globe, friends. Knows better than most how to conceal its identity. Hides behind red giants and blue dwarfs - quite ecumenical in that regard. We were diverted there by an unexpected event... a bout of binge drinking on the part of our new pilot Urich Von Braun, who took up with that party animal (in a manner of speaking) sFshzenKlyrn to slog their way through a quart and a half of Zenite lager. Not sure if you've ever had any of that particular micro-brew - ...

The president elect is getting an earful from just about everybody these days, not surprisingly. (His impossibly lame successor is now fully occupied with patching his own image. More on this later.) Surely the O-man won't mind hearing from one more stranger, one more time. Let's find out. Here are a few more things to bug him about. Somalia. Our government has been pumping cash into the Ethiopian regime for years, despite (or perhaps because of) their poor record on human rights, and in 2006 we assisted them in the invasion of Somalia, throwing that sorry nation into another tailspin of chaotic bloodletting (more than a decade of which it had only recently extricated itself from). Apparently the Bush administration had a problem with Somalia's ruling Council of Islamic Courts, claiming it was run by Al Qaida operatives - a claim that had about as much credibility as the White House's claims about Saddam Hussein's bin Laden ties. (I'm not talking fancy neckwear...

Electrodes to power. Turbines to speed. Do I have to say that every time before we lift off? Yeah, I do. What of it? Oh, yeah - hi, everyone. Big Green here, on the as-yet undiscovered companion (or "planet") circling the star Sirius, once again preparing for lift-off after a relatively successful string of gigs. What do I mean by "relatively successful"? Well, that's a somewhat qualified term, I will admit. Let me put a finer point on it. In the Big Green performance book, "success" is defined in degrees of survivability. "Relatively successful" means that few of the bottles tossed at us from the first five rows actually connected with their targets. Fortunately, with someone like sFshzenKlyrn in the group, there's a significantly lower likelihood of being hit by missiles of any kind, since our Zenite friend is himself a celestial object of indeterminate volume and mass, surrounded by complex magnetic fields that act like an invisib...