Hammer Mill Days

It's the last train to Loserville and I'll meet you at the station. Wasn't that a Monkees song? No? Okay ... that earworm crawled away decades ago. Well, here we are, kicking around the mill, just me and my shadow ... and Marvin (my personal robot assistant). Brother and bandmate Matt Perry has taken up residence in some other abandoned structure. We get together for recordings, podcast sessions, etc., then he goes home to his shack and I to mine. The mansized tuber has planted himself firmly in the courtyard; I bring a bucket of swill out to him every couple of days. Livin' the life, as they say. As you can imagine, the utility costs here are fantastic. The abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill is, as I have said many times, a drafty old barn of a place, and most of the heat goes straight out the window (the same window, incidentally, that the rain and snow comes in through). Whoever is paying the fuel bills must be ripping his/her hair out by now. And then there's the ...

If there is one enduring truth about America, it is this: we are extremely good at making a mess and abysmally inept at cleaning it up. The Veterans Administration controversy has been over a decade in the making, and is nothing unprecedented or even particularly unusual. Recall that the Afghan and Iraq wars were supposed to be conducted, in essence, free of charge with minimal casualties. The Iraq war, in particular, was low-balled by Bush administration officials, most notably Paul Wolfowitz, who opined to Congress that it might cost us a billion or two. They were convinced that the war would be short and sweet. They did not plan for the occupation of Iraq, nor did they plan for decades of health care services for returning veterans. It was going to be a cake walk. Yeah, not so much. But it did sound good at the time, didn't it? And now, many deaths, dismemberments, and billions of dollars later, we are faced with an enormous backlog of wounded and battle-stressed soldiers, a...

Lincoln has returned to the 1860s via the Orgone Generating Device intertemporal portal, and best of luck to him. Hope he doesn't run into any dental problems while he's back there. Whiskey and pliers, that's what he'll have to look forward to in that grisly century. Well, that kind of solves his problem. What about the rest of us in the Big Green collective? A kind of dwindling party, it seems. Lincoln is back in Washington (though his evil doppelganger Anti-Lincoln remains). Washington is presumably back in Lincoln (Nebraska). Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, is still on an extended tour of resort hotels, attending mad science conferences and watching the sun set on five continents with a glass of bourbon in one hand and a Cuban cigar in the other. Now that our interstellar tour is over, our occasional guitarist sFshzenKlyrn has returned to his home planet of Zenon in the Small Megellanic Cloud. Let's see ... what else is in the news? Oh, yeah ... the...

Senator Marco Rubio of Florida is just the latest Republican politician with presidential ambitions to cast doubt on the validity of climate change, a necessary prerequisite for claiming the G.O.P. nomination in 2016. Indeed, anyone who is going to have a ghost of a chance with the tea-party fueled right-wing electorate in that party needs to be a climate change denialist to the core (though Rubio has since backpedaled slightly, perhaps in embarrassment). Sadly, then, the senator is not alone. Now, I don't usually comment on opinion columns, but I will make an exception on this occasion, only because columnist Tom Morgan is spectacularly deserving of the "tin ear" award for his column " Remember that report? Well, forget it ." I know Morgan is trying to be, well ... sort of funny, I guess, but when he spouts something like this, the humor escapes me: That is part of the problem the president and the Greens face. They want us to be alarmed by climate whatever...

How about a bicycle tour around Scandinavia? They don't have any big hills there, do they? Oh. Okay, well ... how about Holland? Right. Too many stoned drivers. So I guess, by your logic, Colorado is the worst of all possible worlds for bike tours. Yeah, well ... Lincoln didn't think that last comment was too funny, and apparently now he's determined to jump back into the past, where (arguably) he belongs ... even though in much of the past, he's dead. So I guess he's saying he'd rather be dead than spend another summer with Big Green. That's just plain sad, you know? I'm sure plenty of less revered ex presidents would be more than glad to spend the summer with us, rather than in some poorly defined version of America's past. But Lincoln does not count himself among that number. So, it looks like pretty soon we'll be going down to the cobweb-choked basement of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted home, and dusting off Trevor James Co...

Okay, I've been out of commission for a few days, taking comprehensive exams for a master's degree in lethargy. (Hard to study for, actually ... I keep falling asleep.) And though I've been quiet, very quiet for the last couple of weeks, I have been paying attention to what's going on out in that wacky world of ours, and I have a thing or two to say about it. Just bet you can't wait to hear it! Harumph ! Benghazi . Really? I mean, really ? The republicans are on this Benghazi thing again? Why? Because the Affordable Care Act may not be as good a campaign issue as they thought? I keep hearing this trope about how awful it is that four people were killed. Yes, it's awful. But Libya is a war zone. And these people make more noise about those four lives than they ever did about the more than 4,000 Americans that died in their Iraq war. How about we hold someone (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc.) accountable for that first, then maybe look at Benghazi (right after Afgh...

Hey, Lincoln. No, not you , Anti-Lincoln - I mean your positively-charged doppelganger. Lincoln ... close that window, will you? It's freaking freezing in this barn. I don't care if you're practicing your big speech to an imaginary multitude in the courtyard. Do it in front of an imaginary open window! Yes, here we are ... Big Green is once more ensconced in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill in upstate New York, where the Buffalo never roamed and where peregrine falcons coexist with Web cams (no lie!). We have re-occupied our decrepit squat house, wresting it back from the yahoos that took possession of it while we were out on our multi-planet tour in support of Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick . A triumphant return ... not . We've had better tours, to be sure. (And better interstellar tour buses. That recycled rocket was a real rattle trap from start to finish.) How did we convince the Cliven Bundy wanna-be's to lay down their weapons and let us back into...