Hammer Mill Days

Here. Squeeze your head into this helmet, see if it fits. What? No, I've never seen the movie Scarface . Not all the way through, anyway. Why? Mother of pearl. I'm surrounded by moaners. Nobody wants to wear a freaking space helmet, not even Marvin (my personal robot assistant). He's afraid of getting "helmet hair" of all things. (His so-called "hair" is made of leftover brass fittings from what appeared to be a Victorian era lawn mower.) I keep telling these people - if we're going to pile into that substandard missile Mitch Macaphee found for us and fly to distant solar systems, we will need at least minimal protective gear, to include a) a helmet, b) a bag of oxygen, c) some portable food, preferably sandwiches, d) THERE IS NO "D", e) boots, non hobnail variety, and f) a bunch of other stuff that you might need for space travel on the cheap. (Look it up on the Web.) Would that that were the worst of our problems. Fact is, Mitch...

Some storm, that Irene. Trouble is, it may - as so many recent catastrophic weather events have - turn out merely to be a taste of things to come. I can tell you, I've lived in the northeast for fifty years - that's 350 dog years, young 'uns! - and I have never seen anything like the flooding that has affected so much of northern and eastern New York. For chrissake, a street two blocks away from me was evacuated due to flooding... and we got just a very small piece of the storm. I shudder to think what might have happened to us if that storm had hit a bit further to the west. Here's the thing, though - this has been a disastrous year for weather pretty much everywhere. We've had tornados here in upstate New York. Multiple tornados. (My cousin saw three funnel clouds while out on the golf course that day.) Sure, we've gotten them before, but they were more like three in a decade, and not anything on a grand, midwestern scale. Just this morning, on NPR, the fi...

Well, I guess THAT didn't work. Spectacular failure, old man. What's next on the agenda? Setting toast on fire? Turning gold into lead? Some other feat of science? Oh, hello. If you detect some sarcasm in my voice, it's no accident. I'm merely ripping on Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, whose latest experiment/get weird quick scheme was an abysmal failure. Sometimes I think old Mitch is losing his touch. Sometimes I think we of Big Green should be looking around for another mad science advisor. Not to replace Mitch, you understand, but rather to keep him company in his dotage. Maybe that would give him someone to talk to about how his time travel experiment was about as amazing as someone hiding in a closet for half an hour. No, Mitch - I'm not kidding... it was just that bad. I've seen grade school magic tricks that put that to shame, man. All right, maybe I'm being a bit too hard on the guy. Frankly, I'm a little miffed at him over anoth...

Anxious to report on an "end game" in Libya, the press have amped up coverage on that conflict, though not their capacity for clear-eyed criticism. I heard one story in a news report this week about a squalid refugee camp on Libya's border with Egypt for guest workers from other African countries, undefended by any kind of perimeter barrier, low on supplies, being neglected by the rebels who control that area. That was one item that indicated some kind of journalistic curiosity and a willingness to go beyond the press release (even if it is hard and messy). Now, President Obama has pointed to the Libyan intervention as an example of what the NATO alliance was capable of. I am inclined to agree - it took combined force from the world's most powerful militaries to drive Gaddafi from the seat of power... after 4 months of god knows what. I think the administration would be well-advised to avoid any bold statements of success based on this experience. This is Iraq war ...

Gonna' pump some liquid oxygen... and twirl my sextant dial. I said I'm gonna' pump some liquid oxygen... and twirl my sextant dial. And when I lift you off that launch pad... baby you know you'll ride in style. Oh, yeah! Yeah, sounds like we need a little more chunkiness in the rhythm section. What? Oh... we have visitors. Hello, blogsters. It's your old pal Bozo. Nothing like a little blues to take your mind of your troubles, eh? And a little country western to put it back on 'em. (Keep talkin' like that, and more than a few Texans'll want to treat me kinda ugly.) Yeah, we're just working our way down to our departure time. What will our interstellar conveyance be? Glad you asked. It's about time someone asked. No one around the Hammer Mill has bothered inquiring. A strange disinterest has taken hold of Big Green and its entourage, apparently. It entered the room like a miasma, pulled up a chair and made itself at home. Honestly, I d...

President Obama is on vacation this week, sort of. Him and about a thousand other people, bringing him information, taking his orders, blah, blah. I don't know why he bothers, but... he does. With that job, you may as well assume that you're going to be working straight for four to eight years. Even so, every American president since Carter has been determined not to seem like he's barricaded in to the White House, manning his vigil in vain. So Obama, like his predecessors, takes a ceremonial vacation, and his detractors take aim. Of course, they would anyway. He has locked himself into Washington! He's out of touch with (white) America! they would cry if he were to cancel his outing. May as well go, Barry. Frankly, if he were to come back from the Vineyard with a Jobs / Recovery Act proposal that involves bold efforts to fund infrastructure projects, incentivize hiring, raise taxes on the rich, and so on, I would be the first to say that the man has earned his rest...

You hear that? That part there... yep. The honking trombone. Who was puffing on that sucker? Lincoln, was that you? Marvin (my personal robot assistant)? Mitch? Anybody going to own up to that heinous honking? Oh, hi. You're getting us in the middle of a band meeting, as you can see. (Murray, present. Bret, present...) Kind of an ugly look at how the sausage of Big Green's music is cranked out. Okay, so our production values are not the best, and our process is flawed. So we hear stuff in our recordings we didn't even know was there when we were tracking them. That's part of the Big Green method, man. It's a bit like found sound; it's basically lost sound. Somebody misplaces a trombone part somewhere in the known universe (or perhaps in any one of an infinite number of possible universes), and it turns up embedded in one of our tunes like a foreign correspondent on a battlefield assignment. I guess in that respect we owe a great deal more to our old fri...