Hammer Mill Days

It's going to take how long? Are you serious? What the hell, Urich - can't this tub move any faster than that? We're only talking about 17 light years. Oh, man... if only there were a "first class" in intergalactic space! Everything... and I mean every thing is coach. Urich, our somewhat fanatical pilot (I think he may be the only surviving German kamikaze, but that's just a guess), tells me that we've got quite a ways yet to go bobbing along here in the trackless void. We're all resorting to the stuff we do when there's nothing to do. Matt catalogues his bird species. John flies virtual airplanes across the Pacific. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) plays with his diode collection (the Frenchman thing wore off after a few days, thank goddess). The Lincolns argue about the war with Mexico. I could go on, but ... you get the idea. And what do I do? Well, not much... I strum my broken down Hagstrom III guitar and reach into the mailbag for whatev...

I expect you saw one or more of the closing performances put in by our erstwhile commander in chief. The last, his farewell address to the nation, was a flaccid medley of his most oft-repeated themes, a bit tired-sounding after eight years, but drafted semi-competently for Bush by whoever is left to do these things at the White House. This was Bush the product - the visionary warrior-prince with the wry "by crackee" half-grin and glint of optimism. For my money, the final press conference provided a far more honest portrait of the man. This is the Bush we really knew - arrogant and dismissive; an obvious imbecile who talks down to you; a man constitutionally incapable of admitting error and for all appearances utterly delighted with the very thought of himself. For him, the presidency is an intensely personal experience - so much so that he seems to measure every trial he put the nation through by its effect on his demeanor. It was a pretty amazing performance. I wonder what ...

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...