Hammer Mill Days

We'll be home for Christmas? Only in your dreams. Yes, I know... we should do the decent, right? Be with our families, etc. Alas, technology makes clueless monkeys of us all. This horrible rust-bucket leftover from some forgotten interplanetary invasion we rented as transport during our interstellar tour has blown yet another gasket or some such thing, per our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee. He used a lot of big words, none of which I'd ever heard before (though Matt was familiar with several of them... strange...). The upshot is, we're chugging along at subnormal speed, making our leisurely way back to Earth from the Kuiper Belt - last stop on the ENTER THE MIND: THE ULTIMATE BIG GREEN EXPERIENCE interstellar tour. So... like my cat Macky, we're making the best of it. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) has fashioned a Christmas tree out of whatever was available. The mansized tuber has been coaxed out of his terrarium to serve as the aforementioned "whateve...

After a whirlwind lame duck session for the 111th Congress, it appears as though gays will soon be able to serve openly in the military. I must emphasize the modifier "soon", as it is not yet safe to make your sexual orientation known in the service, and it won't be until the Administration and the Pentagon completes their review process. None the less, his was a long time coming, and I am glad for those in uniform for whom the repeal of DADT means a kind of liberation. DADT was implemented before we started asking way too much of our military - multiple deployments to multiple simultaneous occupations, heavy fighting over stretches of months at a time, high casualty rates, etc. - and it has simply outlived its mandate, in addition to being dead wrong from the start. That's all good, but it's just a step in the right direction. Gay Americans are still second-class citizens, barred from full civil rights as of this moment. As of now, there is an institutional neces...

That looks like my first pair of Chuck Taylors. Always wondered what happened to them. And there's that bike that got stolen when I was twelve. And some pocket lint that looks very familiar. Oh, hi, friends of Big Green . Glad this is getting out to you. WiFi is a little unreliable out here in the midst of the Kuiper Belt... all these particles and planetoids cause a boatload of interference, as you might well imagine. Yes, we did manage to navigate our way through the black hole that had parked itself next to that annoying Goldilocks Planet our label talked us into playing. (We now know why the Gliesians call the black hole "Papa Bear"). The advice we'd been given took us right into the old vortex. Turns out it's just a transdimensional expressway back to the Kuiper Belt. Bit of good luck, that. So, yeah... we're here for the final leg of our somewhat anti-climactic ENTER THE MIND: THE ULTIMATE BIG GREEN EXPERIENCE interstellar tour 2010. Why anti-climactic? ...

I've heard a kind of depressing story the last couple of days about a bureau of the Postal Service tasked with opening letters to Santa Claus. Here's a somewhat strange version from NPR's All Things Considered in which Robert Siegel tries to lighten things up with some lame quips. They've been finding that, this year, kids are tending less to ask for gaming consoles and the like than stuff like warm coats, shoes, etc. Just a hint of how rough people have it these days - a peek into the Dickensian hellscape inhabited by the millions upon millions of children (and their parents) living in poverty. Our top-down economy is literally killing hope before it even has the chance to learn how to express itself. I'm not a practicing Christian, nor am I big on organized religion in general, but if there's one thing valuable about the Christmas season it's the sense of possibility it can engender in people - not so much the expectation of personal gain, but more the no...

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...