Hammer Mill Days

Okay, well, THAT didn't go so well, did it? Right. Don't panic. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three … arrrrrgghhh. It's been a couple of weeks, so I don't know if you recall our harebrained plan to get to the various extraterrestrial venues in our interstellar tour to support Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick (selling quite briskly on Aldebaran, I hear). Right, well… we have that rent-a-wreck rocket (or "wreck-it") that will get us part of the way to Aldebaran and points west-southwest, but it doesn't quite have the horsepower to escape our solar system. If we tried, at this time of year, we would get caught in the gravitational pull of the sun. Then the only pleasure we'd get out of this trip would be to watch Smith fry… Okay, I've wandered a bit. Fact is, the only solution we could think up in the absence of our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee is to launch ourselves into extended orbit around the Earth and hitch a ride on the come...

Nelson Mandela is dead, as I'm sure you've heard. Now we need to save his memory from the fate suffered by the leaders of our own freedom movements. We have to keep the loud and the powerful from turning him into a posthumous Santa Claus, as they have attempted to do, with some success, in the case of Martin King, Rosa Parks, and others. King has been reduced to "I have a dream...", that terminal ellipsis containing practically all that he was - a brilliantly thoughtful man at the front of a mass movement made up of very brave, very thoughtful people, many of whose names we will never know, who brought America back from its own version of apartheid. The same process has already begun with Mandela. The movement he led is practically invisible to the American public mind. We have a tendency to focus on individuals, and in so doing, we make even those individuals seem two-dimensional, statue-like in their inscrutable virtue. The long walk to freedom begins to take on t...

Hello, all. Just taking a moment out from our interstellar tour saga to remember an old friend and one-time band-mate who died unexpectedly this past week. I will no doubt return to the utter nonsense that is this blog's usual narrative, but right now I can't quite bring myself to do it. Just need some time for reflection, I guess. Tim Walsh played guitar with a band my brother and I started back in the seventies - a precursor to Big Green in many ways. We had about seventeen names for the group, none of which stuck. (It was a bit like Jethro Tull's early days when they played the same clubs over and over under different names - kind of a good strategy, that.) Tim was my sister's boyfriend at the time; a slightly older (at that point in life, three years made a big difference) kid from Florida who had hair down to his ass, a blackbelt in Tai Kwan Do, and a 1959 black beauty Les Paul Custom. I was young enough to look up to him in those first days. Later on, we were...

I think that's the last of it. Packed tight, top to bottom. Nice job, lads. Okay ... pop the nose cone back on. Time to light this candle! Oh, howdy. Yup, we're getting ready to embark on our upcoming interstellar tour in support of our album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick , which as been a absolute drug on the market down here on earth, but is selling much more briskly in outer spaaaaaaaaaace. Seems like extraterrestrials are totally ready for satirical country-western, mock-pop, found sound records like ours. Who knew? Now if they only adopted some kind of currency that is convertible into our own. Right now they're paying us in photons. No, really. Every month, we get a box full of light in lieu of a royalty check. Try taking that to Chase Bank. I can't even get mortgage backed securities in exchange for that stuff. Still, it's worth something on Aldebaran, and that's all that counts ... if you live on Aldebaran. (We usually resort to doing all ...

One more shot at this Affordable Care Act issue, and then I'll shut up about it for a while. It irritates the hell out of me, to be honest, that I have to defend this product of a conservative think tank, but that's the crossroad we find ourselves at. Just a few points: People losing health insurance. This is a shocker, but people have always been booted out of their health plans. This is nothing new. Sure, Obama didn't qualify his claim that people could stick with their policies if they liked them. But the media's claim that this amounts to the President's "Katrina moment" is simply ludicrous. All of the examples of people who have been forced off of their substandard plans have involved people who can generally afford better. One brought forward by NBC was a freaking attorney in Washington. Come on! People never getting health insurance. While the G.O.P. and the entire mainstream media have had their hair on fire about the attorney lady who lost ...

Just getting a few things packed away in my cozy little cabin, in the makeshift rent-a-spacecraft we've hired for our interstellar tour in support of Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick (our latest album). A few sticks of chewing gum, some duct tape, an x-ray of a tooth (not mine, as it happens - just some random tooth) ... all stuff I wouldn't want to be without for the stretch of weeks we'll spend in the icy void of space. Brrrrr! Anyhow, before I do another hand's turn of real work, I wanted to post my usual visitor's guide to our most recent podcast. I know, I know - podcasts should explain themselves, right? Well, in a perfect world they would, but this world is far from perfect. Just ask Dr. Pangloss. (Wait ... he's probably exactly the person you shouldn 't ask. Try Candide instead.) November's THIS IS BIG GREEN included some very useful tidbits, such as: Ned Trek XIV: The Wrath of Carl - Amazing to hear myself say this, but this fourt...

Back when I was knee high to an antelope, in the scented 1960s, the U.S. was engaged in what is now described as "limited war" in Vietnam. Our concept of limitation is, well, somewhat limited, as it amounted to an all-out attack on Vietnamese society, particularly in the South Vietnam hinterlands, which took the brunt of the bombing, defoliation, and other depredations. Part of that policy was establishment of "Free-fire zones" - when night fell and the friendlies were inside the wire of the strategic hamlet, anything that moved beyond the wire was fair game. Hence the shooting, the bombing, etc. Our drone war in Pakistan-Afghanistan, and essentially everywhere else, runs on a similar principle. It isn't as all-out, of course, but it appears to be nearly as random. And just as every living thing in the Vietnamese countryside was assumed to be Viet Cong, every military age male in the tribal areas of Pakistan is, by definition, an extremist, a combatant, a terr...