Hammer Mill Days

Back to Earth with us, in a manner of speaking. Gravity always brings you home, right? Stupid ass gravity! Oh, well ... where would we be without it? (In space, perhaps.) While we were away on our interstellar trip to nowhere-ville, we dropped another THIS IS BIG GREEN podcast - our annual Holiday Extravaganza, as it were. (And it were ... oh, it were!) If you've listened to it already, then you are among the few who truly understand Christmas cheer, let alone Christmas pride, Christmas joy, and all those other seasonal soap products. (We were sponsored by P&G this year. The really took a gamble!) Anywho, without any further ado, here's what's inside the Holiday podcast: Ned Trek 26: A Very Neddy Christmas. The Ned Trek crew re-enacts Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol with a more modern sensibility. Unprecedented? Certainly not. Nor is it un-presidented. It in fact features cameos by no less than two ex presidents and probably at least one future president....

Here we go headlong into 2016. It feels as if we've already had the year, since pop culture obsesses over the horse-race aspect of elections even if it rarely delves into the substance of what's at issue. Truth be told, the talk shows have been talking about 2016 since 2012, the day after election day. Evidently, it's an eyeball magnet for them, so they'll never stop talking about it, particularly now that we've entered the age of Trump. Good television will always trump (no pun intended) good politics, hands down. So, what are the substantive issues that we should be grappling with in this election year? Same ones as in practically every other year, and you can name them as credibly as I can. Here's my list: Capitalism's Failure. This is an issue that touches on everyone, young and old, working and unemployed or retired, poor and not-so-poor. The internal contradictions of American and, by extension, global capitalism came to a head in the crash of 200...

Think of this as a slow-motion commentary on the Republican debate from last week. None of this is particularly in-depth, but I think it's worth raising a few points about certain participants. Lindsey loves Georgie. At the kid's table, Lindsey Graham got a little carried away over his bro-mance with ex-president and hopefully future convicted war criminal George W. Bush, saying in essence that he misses W and wishes he were still in office to handle the big-as-the-sky threat known as ISIS, which Lindsey previously said wants to "kill us all!!" Not hard to work out why Senator Graham's poll numbers, even in a highly reactionary GOP primary race, hover somewhere between zero and zero point five. Not a majority position. War of the Cubans. Whoa - someone waved a red rag between Senators Cruz and Rubio. Either that or somebody called somebody else's mommy a commie. Fascinating how the supposedly "establishment" candidate Rubio is working hard to o...

  Big Green disintegrates into uncontrollable celebratory joy with a special edition of Ned Trek: A Very Neddy Christmas, four new recordings, and crackhead conversation. Fa-la-freaking-la.   This is Big Green - December 2015. Features: 1) Ned Trek 26: A Very Neddy Christmas, loosely based on Dicken's A Christmas Carol; 2) Song: Christmas Past, by Big Green; 3) Song: McBridy, by Big Green; 4) Song: Romney in Reserve; 5) Song: 40s Guy Christmas; 6) Put the Phone Down: Everything is Peachy Fine (song for George Washington Carver); 7) Corn in my hands; 8. The Beavers' Christmas Tree; 9) Smiling Jack Washington; 10) Cruz vs Rubio: the relative merits; 11) Secretary of State Keema; 12) We'll have to cancel Christmas; 13) Talking entirely in quotes; 14) Time for us to go. Podcast Page >

Not a lot to say this week. Been kind of busy. Don't know where to start. Stopped using personal nominative pronouns. Don't know why. Yeah, it was a week spent in hospitals, rehab centers, etc., etc. - suffice to say that there were no terrible outcomes, but it was an engrossing and exhausting experience, nonetheless. I hope to be posting the holiday episode of our podcast THIS IS BIG GREEN in the coming days, though I did get derailed this week, I will admit. We had a few mixes left to do, but Matt and I did them tonight and recorded the pointless voice track for the podcast, so .... it could happen. Miracles do happen. Anyway, keep your eyes open and leave some room in the stocking. Something tells me there'll be a podcast episode with your name on it dropping down the chimney. Or something. (I'll probably do a political rant as well, just because they're pissing me off so much lately.) More later, people.

I'm not a big fan of zero gravity typing. It's kind of hard to keep your fingers on the keys, frankly. Marvin (my personal robot assistant) - can you take dictation? There's a good chap. Okay, well ... as you may have surmised, we of Big Green are in transit this week. Our brief stint on GJ 1132b, the newly discovered world parked on the very edge of human knowledge was not hugely memorable. Thinly attended, let's say. Sure, we set up our gear and cranked through a few of our better known numbers. The venue was a cave. And I don't mean that it had bad acoustics, though it did; I mean it was literally a cave on a frozen world, populated by ethereal beings whose very existence is a matter of disputed mad science. (Mitch Macaphee tells me that they are real, but then he talks to elves and fairies, so it's hard to be certain.) Okay, so BIG GREEN’S CAPER BEYOND THE KUIPER (BELT) is kind of a bust. No surprises there. We played that one sorry gig, wearing our pres...

I'm guessing you don't need my opinion on Donald Trump's proposed ban of all Muslims from entering the United States - you've probably heard the full gamut, from Steve King to Bernie Sanders. My first thought was for all of the Muslim students I have known and met, both natural born U.S. citizens and visa holders from countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Palestine, and others. I hear this insane rhetoric, growing louder by the day, and I think of a young fellow from Afghanistan - about the nicest person you could hope to meet - and what his thoughts might be about the people who "liberated" his country, then overstayed their welcome for 14 years. This is what happens in America when anything like a foreign-inspired terror attack takes place: we want to corral all Muslims and start bombing some country most of us couldn't find on a globe with both hands. I've lived through many cycles of this, from the Iran hostage crisis through the first gulf war, ...