Hammer Mill Days

Greetings from the soundstage of terusdanorf girundolph huzzah. Can you hear me out there? Are you sure? Testing, testing... Oh, the trials and tribulations of interstellar tours! And who knows them better than Big Green , right? We know them all, like the backs of our hands. (Hmmmm.... never noticed that mole before. Better get that looked at. And when did I bark that knuckle?) We've grappled with irate, drunken crowds, ill-tempered club owners with six (or even seven) heads, venues that had no air or gravity (had to write those into our contracts - live and learn!), Frankenstein-like bouncers, galaxy collisions in the middle of the second set - we've been there, damnit. And if you include sFshzenKlyrn 's experiences, we're talking about every bad gig back to the big bang (which, I believe, was the name of the Rolling Stones' 1971 tour, wasn't it?) or even further. The big crunch, even. One of those. Anyway... what was I saying? Oh, yeah. Difficult interstellar...

Well, I'd been expecting to see it right along - the 1.000-word diatribe from Chuck Krauthammer in support of Israel's rampage in Gaza. And it did not disappoint... it contains all of the elements that make Krauthammer's screeds extra special: the hollow moralism, the chilling portraits of Palestinian depravity, the meticulous attention to select details coupled with a total neglect of even recent (i.e. the past year's) history. One brief example - he cited 6,464 rocket and mortar attacks from Gaza on southern Israel over the past three years. Since we're counting, I wonder if anyone has bothered to calculate the number of munitions expended by Israel on that sorry strip of land over the same period? No, I thought not. Never once does Krauthammer so much as suggest that Israel bears even minimal responsibility for the massive death and destruction now taking place in Gaza. Quite the contrary, it is Hamas that "is committed to causing the most civilian pain and ...

Did you get through it okay? Good. We did, too. Kind of annoying, but it's over. What's that? You were referring to Christmas ? No, no - I'm talking about the blue-hot sun. Whole different kind of annoying. So, yes... a bit the worse for wear, our second-hand Soyuz spacecraft (personally checked for soundness by Yuri Gugarin himself) did actually carry us through the burning sun without major incident. The man-sized tuber had to turn up the humidity in his special space terrarium, but that's no biggy. We have asked our pilot, Urich Von Braun (son of a rocket scientist, I'm told) to take us home via Proxima Centauri, where we may just stand to make a few extra bucks playing on their equivalent of Austin City Limits (which they call " terusdanorf girundolph huzzah " ... not real catchy) before slinking home to the Cheney Hammer Mill and whatever housekeeping nightmare awaits us there. Hey - we couldn't afford domestic help, okay? And that place sure as h...

Is this the spring of 2002, summer of 2006, or winter of 2009? I've lost track. The Israelis are again engaged in using their enormous (largely U.S. supplied) military might to crush a virtually defenseless people they are compelled by international statute to protect, dropping so-called precision weapons on one of the most densely populated parcels of land on earth and blaming the predictable resulting civilian deaths on those they target. Soon their tanks will roll into the open air prison that is Gaza on yet another mad, premeditated mission of murder and rampage, punishing 1.5 million Palestinians for voting the wrong way two years ago and, more fundamentally, for refusing to disappear as a people. Israel's leaders, once more bloodying the ground for the next election, are intoning the rhetoric of the injured party, the enlightened state that has already endured too much, been too lenient, too forgiving, etc., as they pursue a strategy long in the making to decapitate Hamas...

Sing along with me (to the tune of Jingle Bells)... Oooooh! Christmas freak, Christmas freak, flying through the sun! Burn your charges to a crisp, your work is almost done... Oh! Hi, folks. Just celebrating the holiday the best way we know how... gasping for breath as our maniac pilot drives our sub-standard spacecraft through the center of a blue-hot star. Sure, I know what you're thinking - that's not the kind of Christmas I remember, right? Not the kind you used to know back home in Sheboygan. Well, I'm with you on that, as it happens. I just mean that we're celebrating as best we can under the circumstances... specifically, those of flying headlong through a burning sun. We try to think of it as a slightly hotter version of "'over the river and through the woods" ... though Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is quick to remind me that that is, in fact, a Thanksgiving song, and Thanksgiving was a month ago. Right again, Marvin. Where would we be wi...

Hi again, campers. Back to the Obama to-do list. Since the guy's on vacation, I imagine he might even be able to find the time to read this one. Pull it up on your blackberry while you're sitting on the beach. That's http://www.hammermilldays.com/ , Mr. President-Elect. There's a good chap. This week, domestic policy. Auto bailout. This is indeed a miserable business. The Bush administration has made such a muddle of the economy that it actually makes some of his other monumental failures pale in comparison. And yet when he came forward with the terms of his proposal, he did so in a somewhat self-righteous way, as if to lecture the industry on its failings. There are plenty of failures to take note of, that's for sure... but Bush is in no position to criticize, quite frankly. (It's a bit like Bernie Madoff giving advice on prudent investing.) What is particularly maddening is his focus on the auto workers. In what appears an attempt to throw his fellow Herbert ...

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...