Hammer Mill Days

Great... they're sending a radioactive microbot up my shirtsleeve. You think the TSA is tough? Try the customs line on The "Goldilocks" planet. I want to start this week's "usual rubbish" blog with a thank you to all of those who helped bail us out of the Kaztropharian jail. (You know who you are.) Not sure how everyone worked out how the bail-bond system works on Kaztropharius 137b - must have looked it up on the interwebs. (You have to put up at least three cases of cotton swabs per pound of body weight. It can get costly... so hey, thanks.) Well, as much as I like it on Kaztropharius , we left the moment they opened the cage door, overdue as we were for the next booking on our super-fantastic ENTER THE MIND: THE ULTIMATE BIG GREEN EXPERIENCE interstellar tour. A little place called.... The "Goldilocks" Planet. It was kind of a long passage, so we had some time to rehearse. Matt wanted to polish off some older material. We ran through a few n...

Couple of things to comment on this week. I'll be brief - it's a holiday, for chrissake. Unforced confession. George W. Bush has been hawking his memoir for the last couple of weeks, proudly admitting that he personally authorized the use of waterboarding - a torture technique he considers legal because his legal advisors told him so. "I'm not a lawyer," he told Matt Lauer in one interview. How far would that get any of us in front of a judge? No one seems particularly bothered about this, but Bush's proud admission, along with Cheney's, is basically a declaration that our justice system is in a shambles; that the law applies only to the powerless and that cruel and unusual punishment is acceptable. Torture is a violation of U.S. statute and of international conventions to which the U.S. is both a signatory and a primary participant. Waterboarding is torture; it has been recognized as such since the days of Torquemada and before, I'll wager. Bush and ...

Good evening, everybody... glad you could tune in. This is Joe of Big Green , and I'm joined here by my bandmate/brother Matt Perry, mad scientist Mitch Macaphee, and Marvin (my personal robot assistant). We're running this little web-a-thon to raise funds for our bail, frankly. That's why we're broadcasting from this cramped little cell in a Kaztropharian jail. Yes, yes... we landed back in the crowbar hotel here on Kaztropharius 137b thanks to the efforts of Mitch, here, who took it upon himself to start playing ducks and drakes with the planet's gravitational field. Long story short, it ended up more drakes than ducks, and a pound of flour on Kaztropharius 137b now clocks in at about five tons. At 37 drachmas a pound... well, you do the math. No one can afford the stuff. Bread factories are closing down. Bread riots have plagued the capital. And as the last pockets of resistance are vanquished, the emperor gazes ruefully down from his citadel and ponders the ...

Just a few short shots today. Hopefully one of them will approach some acceptable level of accuracy. Out of work / luck. The House failed to reach the 2/3 majority it needed this week to approve extending unemployment benefits to the millions out of work for an exceedingly long period of time - about 9.6 percent of us, if you count every part-time burger flipper as "employed" (and don't even count those unemployed but no longer looking for work). Once again, our great lawmakers are playing ducks and drakes with people's lives, blaming the victim, punishing those who have paid for their bad decisions. Got the number of your congressman/woman? Get on the phone to them and tell them to vote for this sucker, even if it adds to the freaking deficit. This is a question of survival for millions of American families - what's more important than that? Gitmo conviction. Justice Department prosecutors have won the case against a Gitmo detainee Ahmed Ghailani, but are losin...

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...