Hammer Mill Days

Want the mic a little higher? Okay.... that's the works. Too short still? Let me put it on a milk crate. There - how about now? STILL too short? Ooooooooohhhh! If it sounds like I've been reduced in rank to roadie status, that's because it's true. Just call me Spike or Lenny - you know, one of those roadie names. I've considered investing in a carton of muscle shirts, but I don't have any muscles, so... what's the point, right? (How do I lift those heavy bass cabinets? Tendons only, my friend.) There are worse things to do for a living, only up to now I haven't had to do any of them, so... this is rock bottom. The things we do for friends! And by "friends" I mean robot friends. As I mentioned last week, Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has mustered a small army of robots to do his bidding. He started with a landscaping enterprise, but found that putting lawn mowers in the hands of automatons is kind of a bad idea. (They tend to be a bit mo...

Now hear this - this is a four-star freaking disaster. We need Superman... or Aquaman, perhaps. It is possible - just possible - that by the time I post this screed, the "top kill" method BP cooked up out of last-minute desperation (to save their skins) will have stopped the oilcano. It is also possible that it will have done nothing. In the mean time, millions upon millions of gallons of oil sludge and other chemicals (including dispersants) are sloshing about the Gulf, invading wet lands, fouling beaches, destroying underwater biosystems, and otherwise making life impossible for people and other creatures along the Gulf coast. It's clear that the environmental consequences of this spill will be with us for a good many years. It's also clear that this spill was the result of negligence in the extreme; of greed carried to a fatal crescendo. BP and its hirelings were in a tremendous hurry and cut corners drastically. Combine that with the obvious fact that these people...

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...