Hammer Mill Days

Well, I'm back from watering the man-sized tuber. Never thought his personal life decisions would so dramatically affect my schedule, but apparently so. He has to be watered two or three times a day, and it looks like I'm nominated to be his personal gardener. By default. (Well, I can't leave it to anti-Lincoln. He'd set the poor bastard root vegetable on fire!) Anywho, this seems like a good time to talk about our May THIS IS BIG GREEN podcast and what you're likely find lurking inside that largish mp3 file. Here's the rundown: Ned Trek XVIII: Captain Fricassee - This is a riff on the "classic" Star Trek episode "The Enemy Within", in which the captain - in this case, Willard Mittilius Romney - is divided by a transporter malfunction into a good half and a bad half. Our version features a Romney doppelganger that embodies the southern reactionary buried within every conservative candidate for higher office. Gluttony saves the day. Don...

Two events in the news this week struck many - including me - as both depressing and unsurprising. One was the sickening mass killing in California by a depraved disciple of the so-called "men's rights movement", something that seems most vibrantly to inhabit the netherworlds of the net. The other is the ever-ballooning VA debacle, fueled by almost daily revelations about other service members and veterans being denied care to the point of death. No need to explain the depressing element of either of these - the facts are plain and, well, devastating. I will dwell a bit on the unsurprising aspect of the events because it angers me, and as the late Maya Angelou instructed us, anger can be a positive force, so long as it doesn't lead to bitterness. She has a point there. Would that someone had impressed this upon the young shooter in Isla Vista some years back. The shooting cannot surprise us, any more than extreme weather can in the wake of Sandy and Katrina. We go...

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...