Hammer Mill Days

There's a lot I could say at this juncture, Mitch. A whole lot... but I think I'll just hold my tongue. Don't want to spend time in a Kaztropharian jail if you don't have to. Oh, hi.... We've found our way to planet Kaztropharius 137b with both hands, as you might divine from that last bit of dialogue - the latest venue on our ENTER THE MIND: THE ULTIMATE BIG GREEN EXPERIENCE tour of the galaxy. How do you tour a whole galaxy exactly? Quite simple - just jump on the ship before we take off... next time. Right now we're deep in the middle of nowhere, anchored to a planet that seems to like our music (something in the air, I think, makes it sound better up here... perhaps a hallucinogenic quality). Kaztropharius 137b (I think I've got that spelling correct) is a solid little globe with a nickel core. Molten nickel, I'm told - I can't say for certain, since I've never been there, but it seems a reasonable assumption. Our first couple of performa...

The election is barely past us and corporate America is already knocking on our door for the rent. Speaking of timing, former Sen. Alan Simpson and former Clinton Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles, co-chairs of the president's commission on deficit reduction, have agreed we should gut Social Security, Medicare. Well, there's a surprise - both have an execrable history of animosity towards these quite successful social programs. (Simpson's contempt for elderly people is palpable and disgusting, and he never misses an opportunity to toss a rhetorical brick at them.) Of course, their proposal also calls for tax cuts for the rich and for corporations. Again, no surprises there. This is just the latest chapter in the attack against the poor, working class, elderly, and infirm that has been underway for decades in this country. Time and time again they have sought to undermine Social Security, to loot its trust fund, and to convert it into something it was never intended to be - an i...

We're off the charts? Finally! Took long enough. What the hell... this band has been going for 25 years and we... What? Oh. We're off the star charts. Right. Well, space travel has just gotten a lot more confusing, people. Much, much more complicated than even a few weeks ago when we left planet Earth to embark on this ENTER THE MIND: THE ULTIMATE BIG GREEN EXPERIENCE tour. It seems that normal (i.e. not mad) scientists back on Earth have discovered the existence of literally millions.... perhaps BILLIONS of Earth-sized planets circling stars throughout our galaxy. As we're bobbing around out here, trying to find our next destination ( Kaztropharius 137b ), we've been scratching our heads, trying to figure out where all of these freaking planets came from. None of them are on the charts. Lots of them look alike. This is bloody ridiculous. Okay, so... where do we start? With the mad scientist, of course. Mitch Macaphee knows everything about planets and planetoids, from...

Looks like we all drive with Boehner. And perhaps swim with Aqua Buddha. Okay, so... here's the irony of this mid-term election. Admittedly Obama isn't the most "outside of the box" thinker imaginable, but when he came into office two years ago, he had a relatively ambitious agenda that included a major stimulus package. The original version included infrastructure spending that would have put some fuel into this sluggish recovery. The Republicans had decided, of course, to vote no on everything, including cloture for all Senate bills, making the bar for passage of anything more than sixty votes. The stimulus got watered down with tax cuts - 30% or so was tax cuts - to bring along people like Arlen Specter, who was a Republican then. Of course, that spending package worked by all measures... but only so well, as tax cuts have always been a pretty poor method for stimulating the economy. The G.O.P. then tag the dems with the "failed stimulus", even though its...

No, no - that is Antares. This is Betelgeuse. And Kaztrofarius 137b is way over here, not here . Jesus christmas, Mitch! I thought you said you could read maps. Okay, well... that's great. Only the third leg of ENTER THE MIND 2010: THE ULTIMATE BIG GREEN EXPERIENCE - our current interstellar tour - and we're freaking lost like a bunch of rubes in blindfolds feeling their way around Manhattan. When? When will I stop listening to people when they tell me shit that isn't true? Mitch Macaphee, a man who can build robots, invent planet-busting snake oil, and repair an ion-drive engine with egg cartons and bailing wire, told me that he was an expert with star charts. Well, guess what. He exaggerated. Slightly. Just slightly. Like... not at all. How lost are we? Hard to tell. I asked Marvin (my personal robot assistant) what he thought, and he just blinked his lights on and off for a minute or two, said nothing. A deathly silence from this man of brass. Not a good sign when you...

Just a few thoughts prior to the most expensive mid-term elections in U.S. history. Don't abstain. You've heard this before from wiser people than me. You've even heard it from me . In any case, here it is again - don't stay home on election day. Go out and vote. Vote against the money tide from corporate America. Make their Supreme Court-sanctioned pay-to-play electoral machine useless to them. It only works if we cooperate by failing to oppose their favored candidates - don't. Get out there and mark those ballots - again, not because that's the only thing that needs to happen in order to build a better world, but because it's necessary to keep the media-fueled G.O.P. "tsunami" myth from materializing. I'm most particularly addressing this message to folks in states like Wisconsin, where you are represented by the finest member of the U.S. Senate. For god's sake, don't replace Feingold with some vacuous millionaire CEO. And for those ...

You can't lift that? Are you sure? Try again. Put your back into it. Some robot assistant you turned out to be! Can't even lift a freaking bottlecap. Okay, well, here we are on a virtually invisible "supermass" planet orbiting the red giant Antares. Hate to tell you what the fine is for littering on this rock. Something to do with being staked out while drunken cops take pot shots at you with flame throwers. (I think I've got that right.) Thing is, the gravity here is outrageous. I admit we've all put on a few (and when I say "all" I mean "me") since our salad days back in the '80s, but on Antares 3 we're all heavyweights. In fact, I weigh about seventeen tons here. (I'm talking metric tons, besides.) And when you drop something, it's like the sucker is welded to the ground. (Of course, in places, the ground is molten, so it might just BE welded to the ground.) I shouldn't blame Marvin (my personal robot assistant) for ...