Hammer Mill Days

Well, I haven't seen it. What kind of belt is it? Nothing of the kind. What am I, your valet? Damn it, man - use your eyes! Oh.... the Kuiper Belt. Right... nope, haven't seen it. Then there's that third reason. A little known fact about the "Goldilocks Planet": it lives right next door to the mother of all black holes (I believe that's referred to as the "Three Bears Neutron Star"). Before we took off, we asked the Gliseans how best to navigate back in the direction of our home system. They gave us what was, for them, some pretty typical advise - go left, but not too far left; then take a right turn at the asteroid... not the BIG asteroid, not the LITTLE one, the JUST RIGHT one ... and so on. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) took all this down in his memory banks, then plugged himself into our spacecraft's navigational computer and passed the directions along. (It may have been my imagination, but he always seems to have a self-satisfied smi...

Okay, so the president has a bit to apologize for. He's not alone in that respect - plenty of blame to go around here. Fact is, the administration is certainly wrong to criticize the liberal-left for denouncing the deal he cut with Republicans this week. If the president was painted into a corner, it was not by the left. The Congress members who were dead set against raising the tax issue before this past election were "Blue Dog" conservatives, worried about offending their constituencies - the same voters that would soon send more than half of them packing. It is now these conservative Democrats that Obama is relying upon during the lame duck session to shepherd this deal through the House. It seems likely that most Republicans will support it, so he hardly needs the entire Democratic caucus. In any case, the capitulation happened a long time ago. At this point, the main thing is making certain that unemployed workers get the help they need. I don't care how we get t...

The gravity's not too strong, not too weak. The water is not too wet, not too dry. The inhabitants are not too short, not too tall.... MAN this place is ANNOYING! Yes, this is Big Green , reporting live from the Goldilocks Planet, recently discovered orbiting the star Gliese 581 - technical name is Gliese 581g, actually, one of six sibling planets (Did Goldilocks have siblings? Don't know. What an exasperatingly ill-defined folk tale!) After its recent discovery, we decided to make it a stop on our ENTER THE MIND: THE ULTIMATE BIG GREEN EXPERIENCE interstellar tour, but now I'm beginning to have some regrets. It's just to damned perfect down here. It's a planet of anal retentive mo-fo's (though they're not too obsessive about it ... which if anything is even more exasperating). Take our itinerary (please!). We showed up to the first gig about fifteen minutes late. You'd think we'd shot somebody. The Glieseans were running about with five of their six...

All right, here are a few wild passes at some current issues. Leaking the obvious. Now that there's a concerted effort by telecom corporations to shut down access to Wikileaks and a man hunt underway for Julian Assange, perhaps someone should stop and consider how asinine this vendetta truly is. It's the internet, for chrissake... if the documents get lifted, they will certainly be posted somewhere. And sure, the cables are embarrassing to diplomats, etc. But are any of the most publicized revelations in the latest Wikileaks document dump at all surprising? Consider... Iranian influence in Iraq. Well, there's a shocker. Iran has been spending money in Iraq, has relationships with many of its senior leaders. Is it possible that anyone would be surprised by this? Iraq is a majority Shi'a country, like Iran. There are longstanding cultural, religious, and political ties between these two neighboring states, and many Iraqi political figures took exile in Iran during the ...

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 ...