Hammer Mill Days

Gather 'round the fire, folks. Everybody got their hot chocolate? Not too, hot, right? Make yourselves comfortable. Got some serious yuletide bloviating to do. As I mentioned last week, all of our little elves have been laboring under harsh working conditions in the basement of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, hammering together the disjointed fragments of Big Green's Christmas Podcast . A thankless job, to be sure, but somebody has to do it (at a substandard wage). Next year maybe we outsource to Sri Lanka in honor of Mitt Romney's eventual nomination. Or not. Anyway.... Christmas... It occurs to me, listening to our holiday audio extravaganza, that our explanations of the songs included in the podcast are, shall we say, somewhat wanting. So what the hell... I'm going to give you the low-down on all of them, just so that you can be a more informed listener. That's how we roll over here at Big Green - full disclosure at all times. Why, you may ask? Well... I'...

I'm hip-deep in audio editing right now, so again... forgive me for shooting from the hip. I didn't want to let too many weeks go by without commenting on the Durban Conference on climate change. I have to say, the Obama administration has gotten really good at acting as though they're doing something progressive when, in fact, they are doing next to nothing at all. What Durban demonstrated was that, more than any other nation, the United States is an obstruction to any action to alleviate the effects of climate change. Others are following our example, emboldened by our refusal to take this crisis seriously. Canada - currently headed by George W. Bush/David Cameron hybrid Stephen Harper - is pulling out of Kyoto while pulling strings to avoid (unsuccessfully, it appears) having its tar-sands oil appropriately labeled as dirty by the EU. Russia is balking at emissions reductions as well. The fact that we lead the denialist camp gives them lots of cover. There was a time, ab...

We don't have a garage. This is an abandoned hammer mill, built when people didn't have cars. There is no garage here, get me? Now DON'T CALL HERE AGAIN! ( Click ! buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.... ) Got to love these small town managers. It's bad enough that they pass an ordinance against squatting in abandoned properties (something Lincoln is convinced is aimed directly at us, lawyer that he is); now they've got one against all night parking. Thing is, we - that is to say, the core members of the musical collective known as Big Green - don't even have cars. We're not parking overnight on the street because we've got nothing to park. No, no - they're complaining about the big, blimp-like space vehicle we rented for our recent interstellar tour, which is still hovering over the mill like some kind of sales promotion. (The owner has yet to pick it up.) The town would hang tickets on the thing if they could find a ladder long enough. (They're talkin...

A little more off the top of my head. One of these weeks I'm going to take some pains over this posting, but... not this time. Don't worry, Kyoto. Canada's pulling out of the Kyoto Protocol (can you say "tar sands"?) and Durban was a bust. What's it going to take, people? We had massive tornadic storms this past year. We don't have the luxury of another decade of inaction and ignorance. See you in health. One of the issues that comes up in our perennial presidential campaign is that of health insurance, mostly in the context of so-called "Obama Care". What doesn't get discussed so much is, well, the only possible positive solution to the current situation, which is bankrupting individuals, bleeding businesses dry, and threatening to drown the government in red ink. The only constituency the current health insurance system benefits is private health insurers. Seems like we, as a nation, sacrifice a great deal to preserve their profitability....

Yeah, there's some in here, too. Yep, all over the floor. Jesus Christ on a bike. Where are all the freaking buckets? Why don't squatters have landlords ... with buckets? Oh, hi... Yes, Big Green has made its triumphant return to Earth from its somewhat less-than-triumphant [INSERT NAME HERE] Interstellar Tour 2011, pulling our rental spacecraft into a low, low ... very low parking orbit (approximately 100 feet above the Earth's surface) over the Cheney Hammer Mill, our abandoned mill of a home in upstate New York. And, as will happen when one leaves one's home for a stretch of weeks, some maintenance issues have emerged to greet us, providing us with distraction even before we've had the chance to remove our tour galoshes. They say all roofs leak, but I doubt they all leak this badly. My converted hammer assembly room suite looks like a freaking swimming pool. I think I see fish. Right, well... that's the kind of problem you expect. What I didn't expect w...

Again, just some thoughts. I'm overloaded, as usual. Details at eleven. Cain's out. No more Herman Cain. That's disappointing in a way, though I can't say as I'm all that disappointed whenever a manifestly incompetent right-wing shill is deemed unfit for service as president. He would have been the conduit through which Randy Scheunemann, Phil Graham, and other luminaries would have run the country into yet another deep ditch. Of course, that would be true of practically anyone on the Republican deck right now, save Gingrich, who would likely insist on doing everything (badly) himself. I will, however, miss the Pokeman quotes, the seeming lack of conviction that a president actually needs to show any interest in politics or administrative policy, foreign or domestic. He's like the cut-out who can't hide the fact that he's a cut-out: there's obviously no other reason for him to even want to be president than to carry out the wishes of corporate Ameri...

Okay, then. Is that a wrap? What? It's already the holiday season? What happened to freaking October? Okay, then... so it's a Christmas wrap. Satisfied? Oh, hi. Yeah, I know. After ten weeks on the road, tempers wear a little thin. What, you got a PROBLEM with that? (Sorry. I'll start again.) Post Thanksgiving slump. This shipboard life is not for me; nor, apparently, is it for anyone else on board. Speaking of bored ... this business of bobbing around the solar system is bloody tiresome. I don't know how sFshzenKlyrn stands it, year after year, millennium after millennium. It's just as well that he's a transcendental etheric life form that ignores all boundaries between space, time, and whatever. (Especially the whatever. The man simply cannot take anything seriously.) And then there's Marvin (my personal robot assistant). He's bouncing around this tin can like... like a robot in a tin can. Of course, he always gets antsy this time of year, when the b...