Hammer Mill Days

So, there's a station that's playing our last album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick , in rotation. That's the good news. The bad news? It's in the galaxy of Andromeda, a very long ride from here, I'm told. Can't raise it on my crystal set. (Damn ... we need some new gear.) Well, I am exaggerating a little. Apparently the radio waves from the Andromeda station are reaching planet Earth. Trouble is, no one can translate them into something intelligible. The only people hearing it are rocket scientists, and they're not exactly our audience. Now, shapeless blobs of protoplasm on the planet Mongrovitowa 427K - THAT'S who listens to us (if you can call pseudopod sensory processing of nano-vibrations "listening"). But that counts as airplay in my book. And if we make some eggheads scratch their ... well ... eggheads, then that's all to the good. It's like when the Beatles added that hypersonic message to the family dog at the end of S...

I imagine if you didn't watch the president's state of the union address and listened to NPR (aka Empire) news the next day, you might think they were talking about a speech made by a reactionary republican legislator or pundit. That's all they had on their guest list for the two days following the address. You have to wonder why they feel these people need all this air time. Instead of wallowing in the predictable knee-jerk partisan reactions to the speech, why don't they drill into some of the issues? Sure, they do a little "fact check" report, kind of like Politifact (and just about as superficial). But report on, say, oil and gas drilling and its implications for climate change and ultimately human survival? Not when one of their big sponsors is "think about it dot org". Then there's "Morning Joe" (or "Morning Blow") on purportedly liberal/progressive MSNBC. Their foreign policy braintrust of, well, Joe Scarborough, Rich...

No, the moon is NOT a planet, nor a star. And you may THINK you just saw an ankylosaurus, but they died out 65 million years ago during the late Cretaceous. Don't you know anything? Christ on a bike, what the hell am I, anyway, a grade school teacher? How is it that people (and robots ... and sentient oversized vegetables) can reach adulthood without knowing all this stuff? We may live in a very sheltered environment here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill (and I use the word "sheltered" very, very loosely here), but some light does peek in through the crack in the wall, and a bit of the real world does seep into our isolation. Once in a while. Happened last year, as a matter of fact. You know what it's like when it's the dead of winter and you spend a stretch of days indoors - nothing but you, your personal robot assistant, and a man-sized tuber. Idle minds run in neutral. Ends up being a long game of 20 questions, for chrissake. But you have to keep the kid...

It's just like old times. Terrorism "experts" fanned out across all networks. Threats of new terror attacks every morning. Television commentators hypothesizing about what might be wrong with Islam that it makes its adherents resort to violence. Oh yeah, so reminiscent of the good old days of late 2001. Except that we are already embroiled in endless wars overseas, so it's hard to see how we could react the same way as we did back then. Invade them again! Amazingly, much of what people talked about on television this week was the fact that the Obama Administration did not send anyone to the enormous march in Paris. All I can say about this is, man , this administration really screws up on the simple stuff. I mean, after going through the time trouble to pass a national health care plan (substandard as it was), they couldn't manage to build an e-commerce web site, right? You have to wonder .... why couldn't they just send someone to walk arm and arm with all ...

You can't just look through the telescope. You have to squint really hard to see them. That's because, well, they're either really, really small or really, really far away. What are we doing now? Good question. Aside from working on yet another episode of THIS IS BIG GREEN, our somewhat-monthly podcast, we are trying to catch up with some of the incidental characters in the shaggy dog story of our lives. Isolated from the world as we may be here in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, buried in a mountain of snow, we still have a fitful internet connection and at least one hand free. We can track down pretty much anyone on the other end of that "series of tubes" known as the Web. (Precious little else we can accomplish, at least until Spring.) For instance, what is Mitch Macaphee doing? Well ... a quick investigation using various search engines turned up next to nothing. So I guess what I said in the last paragraph is not entirely true, at least when it comes to...

The year is just getting started, and already there are too many things to write about. Let's start with the obvious. New Congress. The all-new, all-GOP controlled Congress is now in session, with old Kentucky Mitch holding the gavel in the first Republican-led Senate since 2006. You might think you could resist, even for a single moment, the impression that the GOP is a wholly-owned subsidiary of corporate America, the energy companies, and Wall Street ... but that wasn't possible even on the first day of the session. Our representatives are ready to push forward the Keystone XL pipeline, repeating all the bogus claims that this project will create jobs, jobs, jobs, make America more energy secure, and is only opposed by "environmental extremists". Sure, blow up the atmosphere on your first day. Good going, Kentucky Mitch. Charlie Hebdo. The sickening murder of 12 people in Paris by extremists has focused our media-driven culture on the issue of speech freedo...

Holy Moses. Where did all this snow come from? The sky? That's where it ordinarily comes from. There have been exceptions, sure, but ... how likely is that? Well, here we are. First days of the year and we're already snowed in. Mountains of the stuff piled up against the front door of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted home. Just as well that it's relatively congenial in here, that is if you don't mind being cooped up with crazy people. There's Matt, of course, though he mostly occupies himself with tending the wild creatures and feathered friends. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) does have some annoying habits, much as I've tried to program them out of him. (I'm not a scientist - I just play one on the internet.) The most troublesome companion we have in the Mill is anti-Lincoln, the antimatter doppelganger of the Great Emancipator, who was chrono-teleported into our midst some years back by Mitch Macaphee, using Trevor James Constable...