Hammer Mill Days

Marvin (my personal robot assistant)! Can you come in here for a few minutes and vacuum up all these fragments? No, not with your mouth! Use your upholstery attachment. Silly robot. Lots to do around the holidays, as you well know. Some tasks are more challenging than others. I've always found bending candy canes particularly difficult. A lot of breakage. There's got to be a better way! (Matt is thinking about taking a correspondence course in pretzel-bending, so maybe some of those skills will be transferable. We shall see.) As I was saying last week, we have some holiday traditions that we try to observe on a yearly basis. Some of them could be described as strange; others, just a little off the beaten path. Occasionally we try out a new "tradition" and see if it sticks, like that year we put the man-sized tuber on an upside-down wash basin and decorated him like a Christmas tree. I think that was Anti-Lincoln's idea. Anyway, it lacked that kind of stickines...

This has been one of those weeks, to be sure. A lot has happened and very quickly, so let me take these one at a time. Cuba. President Obama announced a reset of relations with Cuba this past Wednesday, an initiative that includes establishment of an American embassy in Havana and the release of the remaining members of the Cuban Five, as well as the return of Alan Gross. This somewhat surprising announcement was, of course, met with flaming hair by the conservative majority in Congress and by other longtime critics of the Cuban revolution. Marco Rubio, for instance, bemoaned the fact that the maximalist goals of conservatives were not realized on the first day of the new relationship. Patience, Marco! The cause of neoliberalism is not yet lost. To listen to Obama's defense of his decision, you would think the prime motivation for improved ties between the two countries is for the joys of capitalism to rain down on the hapless Cubans. God help them. Still, a pretty momentous ...

Oh, Christmas bot, oh, Christmas bot! It's hard to see just what you've got! Yes, yes ... we're polishing up the holiday songs here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. T'is the season and all that. What, you're not familiar with the dirge of the Christmas Bot? Small wonder. We just made it up. What kind of songwriters would we be if we resorted to used Christmas Carols? It would be a total cop out. So we are resolved to write lame Christmas numbers each and every December, five minutes before we hastily record them and throw them up on the internet. You're welcome! Legend has it that every year around this time, the sound of holiday ridiculousness wafts out of the old abandoned mill by the old abandoned canal in this old abandoned town. What an asinine legend. Just the sort of thing you'd expect in this lame backwater. Whoops - should have closed the window before I said that. Now all the neighbors know that I have NOTHING BUT CONTEMPT FOR THIS NEIGHBO...

The Senate report on torture (a.k.a. war crimes) perpetrated by our government is out, and of course, the vast majority of media and political commentary misses the point by a mile. As is often the case with discussion of this issue, the question of efficacy is paramount. Did torture "work"? Did it yield the intelligence our government needed, for instance, to conduct its unauthorized raid on a sovereign country (Pakistan) and assassinate the prime suspect in the 9/11/2001 terror attacks (rather than bring him to trial)? Does it, more generally, extract reliable, "actionable" information, or just a bunch of blather that victims of torture usually pipe up just to make the agony stop? This discussion is not limited to the full-on, proud of all we did crew, like the execrable Dick Cheney, snickering from his podium, confident that he will never pay for his crimes against humanity. This is the discussion being advanced by Senators who supposedly oppose these interroga...

Remind me to tell Marvin (my personal robot assistant) not to leave the lights on all night. We've got the environment to consider. If we don't care about mother earth, who the hell will? Besides ... they freaking keep me up. Oh, yes, my friends. Even here at the Cheney Hammer Mill we are preparing for the impending holiday season. Not without some trepidation, of course. Lord knows this time of year puts people into a kind of feeding frenzy, hyperactive shopping fever, whatever. They lose their reason. They get impatient and even nasty. It's a rough world out there, man. So why would we add our madness to the pile? No reason. Just looking for a way to keep busy. So, what are we planning? Nothing much. Another podcast episode. Couple of new recordings. A bag of crisps. Some flashing lights. I don't know, what do YOU think we should do? We only know how to do one (or two) things. One of them is, well, play strange music. Not Anthony Braxton strange, but strange none ...

Another grand jury delivers yet another unsatisfactory conclusion. Seems like prosecutors now have a workable model for not indicting the proverbial ham sandwich. Convene a grand jury for a specific case. Drop a metric ton of data on them with no clear guidance as to how to make sense of it. Invite the individual against whom charges are being considered to present his case to the jury without pointed cross-examination by prosecutors. Drag it on for an impossibly long time, so that the grand jury is exhausted and only too eager to get back to their lives. Next thing you know, the ham sandwich walks. What does this prove other than the well-established fact that powerful institutions will always find innovative ways to protect themselves? Police are the strong arm of the government, which is itself a rough representation of the sentiments of the general population, this being a democracy. For decades, our politicians have built their careers on stoking fears over crime, particularly u...

Mother of pearl. Is that the time? I thought the sun was getting kind of bright in here. Pull the blinds. No blinds? Arrgh. Hang another sheet over the window. Rolled out of bed a little tardy today. Who can blame me? After a gut-full of grub, a man's thoughts turn to hibernation. Big Green doesn't ordinarily celebrate major holidays, but we did relent this year and enjoy a modest Thanksgiving feast, prepared by the steady hand of our confidant Anti-Lincoln, who has elected to stay at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill while he considers his next steps. (I think he's contemplating some brand of global domination, but no details yet. Can't rush a genius!) Some of you may recall that Lincoln's favorite dish was Chicken Fricasee. Well, that obviously meant something to Anti-matter Lincoln, if only in the sense that he wanted to run in the exact opposite direction with his holiday meal plan. What's the opposite of Chicken Fricasee, you may ask? In anti-Lincoln...