Hammer Mill Days

Glad we got that sorted out. Another rogue operation shut down. Try to behave yourself from now on, Marvin. Marvin? MARVIN!!! Right, well.... lots to keep track of. I know it may look easy, being a member of the virtual rock band Big Green , but there's more to this than meets the eyes (or ears, for that matter). Plenty of demands on our time; enough tasks to fill this drafty old abandoned hammer mill to the rafters, quite frankly. Sure, I know - we haven't gone on tour in a couple of years. No impromptu trips to Neptune, for instance, to take in the annual Methane Fest or perform at one of our favorite hyper-gravity venues (The Flathouse is particularly memorable, for me at least). But there's more to being a band than performing, you know. Much more. I have described in previous posts our grueling production schedule for our upcoming collection, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick. A full album of 15 to 20 new songs in about a year's time - that's greased l...

It's hard to settle on one thing when so much is so fucked up, all at once, so I'm going to just set them up and knock them down. Boston. I am thoroughly disgusted by this crime, by the callous brutality of it. I am sick with the notion that we might be entering an era when bombs go off in our cities with some regularity - hope to hell not. I am horrified at the loss of life and limb and amazed by the selflessness of those who helped others, not knowing or seemingly caring what price they might pay. I am also angered by the eagerness on the part of some organs of the press and near-press to hang the blame on someone when they don't know WTF they're saying. Gun show. Another majority vote fails to carry legislation out of the rat hole that is the U.S. Senate - the proverbial Box of Crackers has once again screwed minimally useful legislation in favor of doing absolutely nothing. These people are hopeless, so just send them the hell home. If you can't pass somet...

You did what to the whom? When was that again? Christ on a bike - I thought you agreed to stop running these freaking rogue operations out of the basement. What's that? You ran it out of the attic ? That's not the point! Ah, hello. Just caught me in the midst of yet another dressing down of Marvin (my personal robot assistant) who, apparently, has some kind of crackpot entrepreneurial streak wired into him. (I need to talk to his inventor, the mad scientist Mitch Macaphee, about this.) Every time I turn around ... and I mean every time, like, if I were to turn around right now it would happen ... he's got some new racket going. It's like living with an audio-animatronic P.T. Barnum. Only with slightly less calliope music. What's the latest? Well, Marvin has been taking advance orders on our upcoming album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick , a collection of Norwegian carpenter songs ... I mean, songs from a now-lost rock opera about the trials and tribulati...

The thing that keeps popping into my mind as more details of the president's budget emerge is the notion of how small-bore our political leaders are about everything. We face enormous problems - climate changes, massive unemployment, deindustrialization, economic inequality, rampant militarism, an out-of-control justice and penal system, rampant gun violence, and so on - and yet our politicians behave like the wizened, stingy little men they are and fail again and again to recognize the scale of what's confronting us. Obama is no exception, his desire to reach a "Grand Bargain" with the Republicans so overriding that he appears to have forgotten who stood out in the sun, rain, whatever, for hours and voted for him last November. Honestly, it's hard to imagine that a Democratic president, serving in the wake of two decades of steady decline for the poor and working class, would opt for a plan that would cut the meager supplemental retirement checks of elderly peo...

That's right, it's "crab nebula". What does it mean? How the hell should I know? What am I, some kind of astronomer or something? Jesus Christ on a bike (which he may well could have been, had he lived in modern times), your brother goes and writes a song lyric and the next thing you know people expect you to tell them what the Sam Hill it means. If I knew that, then I would know what the hell Matt is talking about half the time when he talks ... and I clearly don't , even though he is my own flesh and blood. He ain't heavy, he's my brother. It's his songs that are heavy. Mucho heavy, baby. What song am I being asked about? Well, it's one of the tracks on our forthcoming album ... I mean, collection , entitled Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick . (Rumor has it the songs are part of the soundtrack of a musical about our cousin Rick Perry, but that the musical itself was lost over the side of a pleasure craft on Lake Tahoe.) The song in quest...

This is just another survey of current issues in the news - don't mind me. Tired, can't focus. The Koreas. Yes, there are two of them. And yes, there was a war. But that's about all Americans know about the Korean peninsula except that "North Korea started the war!" and "Kim Jong Sombody is crazy!" Meanwhile, we are flying stealth bombers and stealth fighters and nuclear armed B52s over South Korea in ostentatious demonstrations of force, using some of the very same aircraft that once turned the North into an apocalyptic hellscape. Earth to Obama: There is no military solution to this problem. You've got a State Department full of diplomats - send a few over to fashion a treaty with the North, and this will stop being a problem. K-9 abuse. A few weeks ago, when the latest gun nut incident took place in nearby Herkimer, the State Police used a dog to sniff out the suspect in an abandoned building. The dog was shot dead, as you may have heard. Si...

The thing is, you have to take a crowbar to the lid, like this. Unggh. Unggggh. Arrrgh! Okay, that's harder than it looks. Oh, hi, stalwart friends of Big Green. It is I, Joe of Big Green. Just caught me in the process of trying to get the lid off of the latest episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN , our very popular (in the plant kingdom) monthly podcast, just posted over the last couple of days and ready for download. We want to give people an idea of what they can expect when they download this sucker - all 1 hour and 45 minutes of it, or thereabouts. Wouldn't want you having to cope with a pig in a poke, especially a porker of those dimensions. You have a right to know what's in that great big bag of stupid... and know you shall. Here's what's included in March Fiendraiser 2013 (our bogus fundraising episode), to wit: Ned Trek VIII: The Corn of Ozark Five - Captain Willard Mittillius Romney and First Officer Mr. Ned (the talking dressage horse) are invited dow...