Hammer Mill Days

It's not just the noise, man. It's just a stupid thing to do. For one thing, we don't HAVE a lawn. For another, it's three o'clock in the freaking morning! Oh, hi. Sorry... I was reading Marvin (my personal robot assistant) the riot act. Not that he needs to be reminded of its contents - It's been posted on a spike inside his memory banks for a good many years now. Nevertheless, I felt he needed reminding because he's been unusually disruptive of late. Sure, there have been times when Marvin's programming has gone south or when he's unduly under the influence of nefarious telemetry from alien planets (don't think it doesn't happen, because it does!). Only recently he's been trying his hand (or robotic claw, more properly speaking) at a number of different small enterprises, hoping to make a marginal living in these hard times. (What exactly he needs money for, I don't know. Perhaps some kind of automatonic inebriants.) I don't kno...

A few brief and sullen meditations this week. Not much to say, really, but I'll say it anyway. 'Lection Show. Primary day was a bit underwhelming, to say the least. Not surprised to see Arlen Specter voted down. Just a bit too much political opportunism there to survive, I suppose. Never been very keen on him, I must admit. He was one of the decisive votes in pulling serious infrastructure spending out of the stimulus package last year, as I recall. And it's hard for me to forget his spirited defense of Justice Thomas, whose bitter judicial philosophy (such as it is) we have been saddled with for the past two decades (and will likely have to live through for another two). John Murtha's seat stayed in Democratic hands - that's a disappointment to some. So was Rand Paul's victory in Kentucky, against an establishment candidate avidly supported by Cheney, McConnell and others. While Paul has gotten himself tangled into knots with some absolutist libertarian positi...

Don't tell me what day it is. No, really - I don't want to know. Just let me pretend that it's still Saturday. Yessss.... Saturday.... Oh, man. Typing in my sleep again. Someone should really take this laptop away from me. I'm liable to post ANYTHING while I'm sleeping, even (dare I say it?) the password to Marvin (my personal robot assistant). That's all you would need to make him do YOUR bidding, however inaccurately. Actually, (*yawn*) his password is a vegetable that starts with "P" followed by the fifth number up from zero. Do your worst. Don't forget to oil him regularly, and if he asks you to feed him, just ignore it. He fancies himself some kind of humanoid or cyborg, but that's pretty far from the truth. For chrissake, Mitch Macaphee made him out of bits and spares. Nothing of value in ... HEY! STOP KICKING ME, MARVIN! THAT HURTS!! Word to the wise - he gets kind of ornery sometimes. Or at least since we sent him down that enormous rab...

The price of oil is going up. Way up. In fact, it looks like it's going to cost us the whole Gulf Coast. Don't know if you heard this story on NPR , but apparently the oil volcano (as Rachel Maddow has been calling it) in the Gulf may be spewing ten times as much crude as BP has been estimating. That's up to 70,000 barrels a day, according to this analysis. With all the finger-pointing going on between the various overfed corporations involved in engineering this catastrophe, I guess there just hasn't been enough opportunity to calculate exactly how much toxic sludge is pumped into this vast body of water upon which millions of people - and countless animals - depend. This is almost beyond comment, and it happened before the echo died on Obama's announcement that he would be opening more offshore areas to oil exploration. As great as that sounded at the time, it's getting better and better by the day. These companies are falling all over themselves trying to lim...

It's not use - that guitar string just isn't long enough. We could tie two or three of them together. Or maybe a banjo string.... they're kind of stretchy, aren't they? Yeah, it's us again. Big Green, standing at the rim of another hole to the center of the Earth. Damn, this gets tiresome sometimes. We're not complicated people, you know... aside from that psychology thing. All we want to do is hang out at our abandoned hammer mill, make a little music, watch the stars from the rooftops, bend pretzels on alternate Thursdays, and shoot arrows through the persistent space/time warp in the washroom that Mitch created so many months ago. It's the simple things that give the most pleasure, is it not? (No, really... I want to know. It is the simple things, isn't it?) And yet we are perpetually faced with these complications, these Gordian knots, these Rubic Cubes, these Junior Jumbles, these Uncle Art's Funland spot-the-differences cartoons, these... Okay...

No excuses. This is the best I've got, that's all. It took less than a week following the attempted car bombing in Times Square for us to start tossing our constitutional rights out the window. This is, in some ways, an even more extreme response than the one that followed the catastrophe of 9/11. A failed attempted bombing has got people discussing legislation that would strip citizenship and all of its attendant constitutional rights from U.S. citizens accused of giving material support to terrorist organizations. That's right... accused . No trial by peers. No due process. Just deny people their basic rights as a U.S. citizen on the basis of an accusation or indictment alone. W.t.f. Sounds like a Lieberman idea. Well, it is a Lieberman idea. He and retired male model Scott Brown have put this piece of garbage forward rather proudly, despite the fact that it is a.) almost certainly unconstitutional and b.) such a rabid overreaction to what has occurred that it can only...

Hey, can you hear me down there? Mitch? Tubey? Hellllooooooooo!!!! Oh, yeah - he's done it again. Our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee is the "he" I mean, and he's ... well .. cracked like any good mad scientist would be. I told him a dozen times that building underground tunnels to other countries is just not a very good idea. I warned him that there would be perhaps dire consequences to attempting such a project. Why... just tell me, why do mad scientists NEVER LISTEN TO REASON? WHY MUST THEY DESTROY THEMSELVES AND ALL THAT THEY LOVE? I guess it's just part of the narrative of mad science. You've seen it a million times, on the late, late, late show. Science fiction always makes the evil pay, just like 50's and 60's television. Look at how superman made that clown pay! He asked for it, goddamnit. Um... but I digress. It seems as though Mitch has made the decision to build a separate tunnel to every nation on Earth. He started with Alabama (which h...