Hammer Mill Days

Watch me now - Work, work! (Aw, shake it up, baby!) Work, work! (Yeah, you drive me crazy!) Work, work! (Got a little bit of soul, now!) Yeah, that's me... and yes, I'm doing a cover by The Contours, circa 1962. Got to keep the lights on somehow. If it takes encouraging a bunch of over-swilled woodchucks to do the "Mashed Potato", so be it. And in case some of you feel as though I'm being less than charitable or disrespecting my fellow upstate New Yorkers, think (or feel) again - I am playing for actual woodchucks, and they've been drinking hard cider all night. Tell you something right now - if you think human beings have a corner on inebriation, you've never played the Chuck House (seven blocks south of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill). I sincerely encourage you not to. You know how human drunks have a tendency to throw bottles? Well, here at the Chuck House, hard cider is served in little wooden kegs. That's probably all I need to tell you about th...

There's a lot that can be said about the Senatorial special election in Massachusetts on Jan. 19, and I'm not going to say very much of it. (You've probably heard most of the political post-mortems already.) Looks to me like the good people of our neighboring commonwealth have seen fit to hand Ted Kennedy's old seat to Mitt Romney 2.0, a slight upgrade from the original model (this one, at least, confirmably anatomically correct). As far as his political positions are concerned, it's a mixed bag - a little angry anti-bank populism (People are mad, damn it, and so am I!), a little love for waterboarding, some tin-foil hat-ism, and the usual measure of running away from his most inflammatory comments, like passively questioning president Obama's origin as the son of two legally married individuals. (Smooth.) There's also the listing from political side to political side as needed, like voting in favor of Mitt Romney's statewide health insurance system in M...

Sometimes the magic works, sometimes it doesn't. What can I tell you? You've got to roll with the ... hey.... put the gun down. Put it DOWN! Oh, hi. No worries, my friends, no worries. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) may have a trigger finger, but it's not supple enough to squeeze off anything like an accurate shot. Sometimes he gets worked up enough to wave that old revolver our militant former neighbor Gung-Ho left lying around the mill so many years back. (He dropped it in mid-stride during some imagined emergency, if I recall correctly. It was his side-arm, and he was firing his principal weapon randomly at the time. Those were the days ! ) I know, I know... I shouldn't lecture my mechanical companion, but sometimes it's hard to resist. The fucker gets so disappointed sometimes, you'd think he was, well... human, or something capable of even greater whiny-ness. I guess attendance at his opening night performance of the Wizard of Oz (in three acts) was...

What can one say about the misery, the sheer horror, of what is happening in Haiti right now? It is as if the planet itself has seen fit to kick them in the teeth when they were down. I don't want to write even five more words before encouraging anyone who reads this blog to donate to relief efforts in any way you see fit. (My personal recommendation would be to support Partners in Health , but choose whichever means you prefer.) Aside from the devastation and massive human suffering, the most impressive element of this catastrophe is the hypocrisy demonstrated by people in the United States who have been primarily responsible for the immiseration of Haitians over the past few decades. President Obama is correct when he describes how Haiti is "tied" to the United States historically, but he might more accurately have used the term "chained" - a sickening litany of occupation, subjugation, and sabotage that stretches back to the dawn of that nation's independ...

I think that planter goes over here. No, no... not there. Just behind the divider, where no one can see it. That's right - perfect. Now... where to place the emerald city? Yes, friends... this is Hammermill Days, the blog chronicling Big Green's bizarre existence. You haven't stumbled onto some daycare center message board. I'm just doing a little compassionate backfill for one of our number who does not respond well to his responsibilities. I'm speaking of our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, who cannot take it upon himself to devote a few stray hours to the upbringing of his invention, Marvin (my personal robot assistant). Oh, the trials of surrogate fatherhood ! Now I'm left with filling in for an absentee mad scientist. This is awful - I've forgotten all the rituals, the nostrums, the pat-on-the-head kind of shit. And, well... Marvin is so damn needy. Something in his programming, I think. He craves approval almost as much as he needs 3-in-1 oil. In...

President Obama has announced that the "buck" stops with him when things go wrong within the elaborate intelligence apparatus that supports airport security and anti-terrorism in general. But what about with respect to another type of terrorism - the kind we perpetrate on others? Is he willing to accept that "buck" as well? His predecessor certainly wasn't. Like under Bush II, civilians have been the target of our military in Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Pakistan, and, indirectly, elsewhere. According to the U.N., more than 2,000 civilians were killed in Afghanistan during the first ten months of 2009, about 450 of which are attributable to the U.S. and our allies. That number is probably low, since in every conflict the line is deliberately blurred between combatants and non-combatants, but even if we accept it at face value, 450 deaths represents a lot of suffering, disaffection, and anger. I'm not sure how it is any different to kill hundreds of peasants wit...

Here comes another one. Just like the other one. Where have I heard that before - anyone? Hello, creatures of the Web. It is I, here with news of what's happening in the remote corner of Central New York (itself a remote corner of somewhere else) known as the Cheney Hammer Mill. Stretch out your banjo strings, grease up your mouthharps, and start to wail - we're ready for some good old rustic hillside music, the kind you hear wafting through the pines on a late summer evening in the lower Adirondacks (or, perhaps, the upper Catskills... somewhere around there). Foot-stomping good. Yee ha. Do I sound convincing? Yeah, I know... not. Well, be that as it may, we do crank out a mock-country number every once in a while, usually some kind of political commentary, like High Horse . That seems the closest we can come to authentic north-woods music, and that's about as close as we WANT to come. Though I'm fond of its "woodyness", that quality tends to grate on Marvin ...