Hammer Mill Days

Whoa, incoming! Keep your heads down, my good friends. Here comes another one! Man, that was close ... too close. Oh, hey out there. No, the Cheney Hammer Mill has not suddenly found itself in the middle of a war zone. (Hell, no, we won't go!) We're just discussing reviews for our last few podcasts. These editorial meetings can get kind of brutal, especially when we start looking at what the public has to say about us. Just take a look at the Twitterscape and you'll see what I mean. We get roasted on Twitter every time we open our mouths ... even when Marvin (my personal robot assistant) makes one of those squeaking noises that just sounds like talking. It's brutal out there! Okay, so we're thin skinned. That doesn't stop us putting shit out there, friends. That's because we have a deep and abiding sense of mission. Just look at the line up we have on hand here. Take Lincoln, for example - perhaps our greatest president (though not with us this week a...

Non-stop fun here in the land of the free. No coincidence that this is the week they dedicated the George W. Bush presidential library. Some of the key "decision points" of his presidency were in play this week. Let's start with a honking big one. Syria. Bush's political allies (and many in the "muscular" liberal establishment) have been pushing for wider involvement in the Syrian conflict for a good long while now. This week, unconfirmed reports of the use of sarin gas by the Assad regime surfaced this week, by way of the Israeli and French intelligence services, for the most part. The Obama administration intelligence services seem ambivalent and non-commital on this evidence, but not so Admiral ... I mean Senator John McCain and some of his clones, who really really really wants another mid East conflict on his resume of error. McCain is once again proving why he would have been a catastrophic president. He affects to believe that creating a "...

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...