Hammer Mill Days

Which button do I hit again? The green one? Right. How about that one? Oh, right ... not the red button. Never hit the red button. Oh, hi. Just trying to get the hang of this internet thingy we all keep hearing about. It's like a series of tubes, I'm told, and I have a little trouble sorting out which one you toss the email into, which one you drop the blog posts into, and which one sucks up the podcast. Thankfully, we have our mad science adviser Mitch Macaphee to sort it all out for us. And, of course, Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who is himself - like the internets - a machine. As you may already know, we've just cranked out another installment of our podcast, THIS IS BIG GREEN, which runs roughly every month. (By which I mean, it does get posted every month, in a particularly rough form.) This month's show is packed full of all of that stuff you either like or hate, depending on whether you like or hate the podcast. Here's a little rundown: Ned T...

I'm going to write about a topic I haven't visited for some time in the vain hope that it would be corrected, now that we have left the George W. Bush administration in its deserved dustbin of history. (Save, that is, for within the W. Library, which is a central repository for the disastrous idiocy that was that presidency writ large, but I digress.) The detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has re-entered the news cycle once again, owing in large part to an organized protest - a hunger strike - undertaken by more than 100 of its inmates. I have a few things to say about this shit hole, and I'll keep it brief. First: Why the hell is this place still open? I know, I know - Congress demagogue'd the issue of closing it down and bringing some of the still-accused to the U.S. for trial and likely eventual imprisonment. (There's a surprise - they demagogue everything!) The thing is, Obama has options, particularly with regard to those prisoners cleared for relea...

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...