Hammer Mill Days

What was that sound I heard, coming from down below? Some kind of tectonic activity? A passing subway car? Or could it be..... a tuber in distress? Tubey and Marvin (my personal robot assistant) are still exploring the inner bowels of the Oit. I would post images they've sent via their cell phones, but you would hardly believe your own eyes if you saw them. Crikey, there's a lot going on down there - much more than when we did that Jules Verne-like tour to the center of the Earth a few years ago. Amazing... but then, there's a lot of space below us, if you think about it. (Even if you don't think about it. ) So take my word for it. Don't go there. Just don't. It's hot. It's mean. It's just plain dangerous. So, what does this have to do with you? Well, not much. That's the nature of the internets as we know them. A lot of random, stupid detail about people's personal lives of interest to no one other than themselves. We are certainly guilty of...

More short takes. I'm beat to a pulp this week, quite frankly. My brain is still working, though... I just don't have a lot of endurance. Health care summit. Why bother, right? When are the republicans ever going to agree to anything that even resembles comprehensive health insurance reform? Never. Rebuild the entire thing to suit them, and they'll still vote against it purely for spite. The problem here is, of course, the democrats themselves, who can't seem to recognize when they've got something that's both popular and worth defending. I'm referring to the public option, Medicare expansion, and other measures denounced as "socialism" by the other side (and conservative dems) but which the general public is strongly in favor of. The reason why people aren't fired up about the current plan is that they stripped those measures out to please conservatives. Obama - congress - get a clue! Pass something that will make a real positive difference i...

Down and down and down we go, round and round and round we go... Ah, I forgot what comes next. Oh yeah - it's either "ker-splash!" or "crunch!" Hi, friends. If you're just tuning in (or browsing over), we're working on a little under ground expedition. That crevice that opened up in the foundation of the Cheney Hammer Mill (our adopted home) apparently goes down to the core of our humble planet, and we've taken it upon ourselves to determine just how goddamned deep that actually is. First we sent Marvin (my personal robot assistant) down there, with less than his full cooperation (we had Big Zamboola give him a shove of encouragement). Our latest foray is actually tasked with finding out what happened to Marvin. This consists of the man-sized tuber with a flashlight and a web cam attached to his... well... head (or anterior protuberance, whichever you prefer). Dropping him into the crevice is like dropping a potato down a well. In fact, I don't k...

Kind of unfocused this week with all that's going on, so I'm going to resort once again to brief rants on various topics. Bear with me, friends - I promise to keep the lid of my head on. The Commission. I understand Congress's reluctance to deal with difficult issues like raising taxes, cutting popular programs, etc. That is, however, the main reason why they have been sent to Washington D.C. - to decide where the money for the federal government comes from and where it goes. If they are unable to grapple with these issues, they might consider applying for jobs at the corporations that paid for their campaigns. What irks me about the deficit reduction commission, aside from the participation of paleocons like Alan Simpson, is that they are not directly accountable to the electorate. Even more than that, commissions are usually mustered to do particularly dirty work, like cutting or privatizing Social Security to save a few bucks. Let's look at this for what it is. The...

Anybody got a plumb line? You know - a weight on a string? Come on, people - let's get resourceful here. Jeezus. How about a tape measure with an eggplant tied to the end? Oh, hi out there in TV land. Just attempting to plumb the depths of what has become a rather large rend in the garment of our adoptive home, the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill here in upstate New York. We're just getting a preliminary read here, but I'd say this sucker goes down pretty far. Maybe to the center of the Earth (or, to use the term New York-based geoscientists commonly employ, the "oit"). In fact, I have some pretty good evidence that this crack goes straight through the nougat to the chewy center of our lively little planet. What evidence, you ask? The first-hand kind... as in robot hand... as in Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who volunteered to, well, dive down there and take a look. Now, when I say he volunteered, I mean so in the technical sense. In other words, I called in ...

News organizations, film-makers, and journalists in general have a maddening tendency to personalize everything and render the most complex issues into extended personal anecdotes. It's a method for storytelling tried and true, and it's obviously one that generates sales since it is so prevalent in the mainstream media. This sometimes manifests itself in the form of stories that focus on a reporter's experience rather than whatever that reporter is witnessing. (Gary Trudeau has offered an extreme example of this with his journalist character Roland Hedley and his perpetually inane Twitter feed.) There's also the phenomenon of framing complex historical events as being largely the product of one person's efforts. Probably the best example of this would be Reagan purportedly bringing down the Berlin Wall through the awesome power of speech. And there's "Charlie Wilson's War", the namesake of which - former Texas representative Charlie Wilson - just p...

Now there's something you don't see every day. That is, unless you're one of those people who sees it every day. I'm just sayin'. (Oh no... I've become one of those people who says, "I'm just sayin'..."). The thing I'm seeing (as opposed to the thing I'm sayin' ) is this massive crack in the foundation of our beloved Hammer Mill. Never noticed it before, actually. Funny what you run across when you're snooping around the place, looking for discarded foodstuffs (abandoned sandwiches, leftover fruit, etc.). Pretty soon you're picking up on all of the stuff that's been going on without your noticing it. I always thought that Mitch Macaphee's experiments in plate tectonics might have some regrettable consequences. Now I can see that I was right. What has Mitch been working on, specifically? Funny you should ask. It's this thing he picked up on in one of Matt's songs, a little number called "Why Not Call It G...