Hammer Mill Days

Did you hear that? Hmmmm.... no, neither did I, I guess. How about that ? You too? No. No, I didn't either. Okay, nevermind. See, here's the problem with trying something new - you just don't know how the hell to do it. I keep telling my colleagues this all of the time, but do they listen? No. Oh no, Joe, they tell me, I know just what I'm doing. And besides, bungee jumping off the Eiger doesn't seem all that challenging to me, at least from the comfort of my easy chair . You try to help a brother out, and that's what you get - a load of attitude, special delivery. I am depressed. I might have mentioned last week how, out of desperation, various members of the greater Big Green cohort have been ranging around this backwater town, looking for means of gainful employment, no matter how demeaning. Well, as you might expect, WAL*MART and Home Depot were not hiring our kind, so we've been forced to apply some creative thought to the problem. As it happens, some...

This week will really be short swipes at various topics. I'm utterly up to my eyeballs... so the rascals are safe! State of It. Republicans and Democrats sat together, nice-nice, during the State of the Union address. Such an endearing sight, was it not? In some cases, it seemed like something they may actually have wanted to do; others seemed pressed to do so by a sense of the public mood, perhaps. Either way, it's a bit like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic or spec'ing new curtains on the top floor of the Towering Inferno. (Name checking Irwin Allen here.) Congress is poised to choke ordinary Americans off from a range of federal benefits and services, just as they are dealing with similar reductions at the state and local levels. They have the votes to do it. Sad thing is, Obama seems ready to assist them in this. His somewhat schizophrenic SOTU lurched from major investments to multi-year spending freezes. Domestic spending kept level for five years? Sounds like...

Where the hell is that banjo? What.... Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is using it again? Jesus... how's a brother supposed to sing the blues around here? Have to resort to non-banjo alternatives, I guess. That's the way things go here at the Cheney Hammer Mill. You got complaints? Stand in line for the pluck string instrument. You may call it annoying mountain music. We call it aural psychotherapy. (Of course, when Marvin's doing it, I don't know quite what to call it. ) Be that as it may, you need some kind of relief in these troubled times, when money is as rare as .... well ... rare earths. We've got lots of common earths. My point is... we're freaking broke again. Join the select club of 90% of Americans, eh? Busted! Well, if we have a middle name, it's innovation. Big Innovation Green , that's us. (People often associate another middle name with us... I believe it begins with an "f"). We're constantly thinking of ways to float t...

As is typical for me, I'm going to roll through a couple of topics. Who knows where we'll land, eh? Haiti redux. Jean Claude "Baby Doc" Duvalier returned to Haiti last week, a fact treated as something of a curiosity by the mainstream media. Sure, they referenced the fact that he killed thousands during his 15-year tenure, picking up the club left by his departed "president for life" father (who was himself removed from office via the only constitutional means available to such a leader). But they didn't examine the circumstances of Baby Doc's arrival very deeply at all. All Things Considered did a piece on it Thursday night, and they basically navigated around any suggestion of political maneuvering. (They also managed to avoid mentioning the fact that Lavalas, the largest party in Haiti, was excluded from participating in the recent election.) The most plausible explanation for his return was suggested by Kim Ives of Haiti Liberté on Democracy N...

Just settling in here. Man, but it's good to be back home! If by home, you mean ... something a little more congenial than this dank, drippy, drafty old mill. It is winter in the northeast, after all. (This just in.) And Big Green , being made up of at least 40% sentient life forms, 35% mammalians, tends to be a tad sensitive to the extreme cold. We experience this on our space voyages, of course. Deadly cold in outer space! Just go there and see for yourself. (Bring a jacket... and some oxygen.) It's a real problem for our friends and spokesvegetable, the mansized tuber, whose sap has a decidedly higher freezing point than our own human blood. That means he needs to stay close to the fire... but not TOO close. It's a delicate balance for tubey, let me tell you. So, yeah, it's snowing, soon as we get here, and the freaking place is cold as a polar bear's ass. Basically we're confining ourselves to indoor activities. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is on the...

There's a lot going on these days, but I'll confine my meandering comments to a couple of topics. Tucson shooting. Much has been said and written about this horrible event over the past week. There are one or two things that have stuck in my mind. The first is that weapon - a glock with a 30-round clip. Why the hell are these weapons available for purchase? Where did he get the gun, the ammo? And how many shootings like this will it take to put some reasonable control on such out-of-control firepower? Every time this kind of thing happens, we hear the bleating, "Our thoughts are with the victims of this senseless crime," blah-blah-blah. And yet we do nothing. I thing it's time for Chris Rock's $5,000 bullets. (Adjusted for inflation, that's probably $7,500 per round.) The other thing is the discourse question. There's no question but that over-the-top rhetoric inspires violent acts; whether this is one of them, no one has been able to say. It just see...

This looks like it might be the place. Yes, this is most definitely the place. Kind of. Hey, Mitch.... are you SURE this is the place? All right. We've been out on tour for a while, but not that bloody long. Certainly not long enough to forget where we came from. And yet here we are, trying to work out which abandoned mill belongs to us (and when I say "belong," I mean that in the broadest sense imaginable... broad enough to encompass loose associations). Trouble is, so many mills have closed down around here even since our departure some weeks ago that it's hard to sort it all out. Seems a lot of people are getting into the abandoned mill trade. It's a buyers' market, so to speak... or a squatters' market, actually. Yeah, so anyway... we limped back home, dropped into orbit, threw the anchor over the side, and shimmied down the rope to terra firma. Of course, our rent-a-wreck spaceship was not in stationary orbit, so the freaking anchor was dragging along...