Hammer Mill Days

I've taken to starting the day with a brief lyric from our storied past. (Mostly a two-storied past. We haven't lived in a lot of high-rises in our time.) For some reason, this morning a particular song of Matt's popped up, and I found myself humming along to this stanza from Natural Laws : What's that they've written all up and down the wall? Something about suction and my face. I don't know what they mean or why it's illustrated in green; is it some tasteless reference to my love for you? Some people recite Shakespeare; others read Supreme Court decisions to their children. Me? My tiny mind focuses on the familiar, and there are few things more familiar to me than the boatload of crazy-ass songs I've been living with for the past three decades. Lots of material there - probably a couple hundred songs, poorly recorded on cassette 4-track decks or something meaner, all demos. The copyright folks down at the Library of Congress must think we're a c...

This has been a week of sobering political news, to be sure. The gradual implosion of the institutional republican party continued apace, their preferred candidate falling into a deep hole that I suspect neither Mitt Romney nor an MSNBC town hall can pull him out of. Far more disturbing was various pieces of news from overseas: the heightened war of words on the Korean peninsula, the continued saber-rattling over Iran, and a strike in Somalia that killed 150 "terrorists", though no one is quite sure who these people were. Korea is potentially the most volatile of these. There are literally millions of people living under the gun there, and while the North's leadership is ultra paranoid and appears irrational, they have been driven to this point by the presence of an existential threat: us. We have scores of military bases in South Korea. The South Korean military is under the operational command of our Pentagon. On top of that, we engage in the annual provocation of our...

Twang. Ouch. Twang, twang, twaaaaaangg. Ouch! God damn it. Where did Marvin go, anyway? If there's one thing I hate like fire (aside from fire), it's changing guitar strings, particularly on an acoustic guitar. Whenever I do it, my hands feel like big slabs of beef, like I'm threading a needle with a sledgehammer. Ham-fisted to say the least. (Think that's rough? You should see me PLAY guitar!) Ergo, I get Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to do it whenever possible. Not a bad outcome usually, unless he insists on testing it out afterwards. (Not Greensleeves again, Marvin, for chrissake! I hear it in my sleep as it is!) The reason I'm changing the strings on my 17-year-old Martin D-1 (nearly college age!) is that we're currently producing the next raft of songs to be included in a future episode of Ned Trek, our Star Trek / Mr. Ed political parody . (Complicated enough for you? It's a satire! It's a polemic! It's a musical!) I have a folk-li...

There are a lot of things that can be said of this week's primary contests; it's a pretty complicated story from where I sit. I would have liked to have seen Bernie Sanders do better than four states - Massachusetts would have put a bit more spring into the campaign. If the guy can't win in Massachusetts, you kind of have to scratch your head a little. Totally love Bernie and I agree with most if not all of his policy proposals, but he needs to get people to the polls if it's going to go anywhere. He is, of course, a movement candidate, so my hope is that the movement will outlive the candidacy, but more on that later. Things are more complicated on the right. The Republican races inspire a mixture of joy and dread. The possibility of a Trump presidency is not something I want to contemplate. That said, I couldn't stifle a chortle of joy to see the institutional G.O.P. leadership get what they so richly deserve. After decades of stoking the most virulent reactiona...

Rain, snow, freeze, thaw ... this freaking winter is a climatic yo-yo, full stop. The walls of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill are buckling under the strain of expanding and contracting water. Fun fact: water gets fatter when it freezes. Maybe it needs to add a few extra layers to keep warm - I don't know. What the hell am I, a hydrologist? (The only genuine hydrologist I ever knew talked like Elmer Fudd. Think about THAT for a minute.) Okay, so I'm wrapped in some old burlap, sitting in a distressed easy (or not-so-easy) chair, trying to weather the ... well ... weather against which the crumbling masonry of the mill offers little resistance. Sounds like a good time to give you folks a rundown on our recently-posted February installment of THIS IS BIG GREEN , our podcast. Imagine me opening the front cover of a well-worn volume, illuminated by the warm glow of a nearby fireplace ... ahem ... Ned Trek 27 - Who Mourns for Science? - Goodness me, is it 27 episodes already? (...

As promised, I wanted to scribble a few lines about the loss of Justice Scalia and the consequent shit-storm that has engulfed our nation's political landscape. I'm sure that most of your conservative friends have shared 10 and 20-year-old speeches by Chuck Schumer and Joe Biden as support for the insupportable position taken by the G.O.P. leadership in the Senate. You could do worse than to remind them that (1) both of those speeches were made in a year when there was no vacancy on the court, and (2) both speeches came something like a year after extremist justices were appointed by a Republican president and approved by the Senate without filibuster - in the case of Biden's speech, it was Clarence Thomas, who was approved by a Democratic controlled Senate. (Though it's hard to tell because he's so deathly quiet, Thomas is to the right of their sainted Scalia.) All that said, Obama's natural inclination will be to offer an olive-branch appointment, something ...

Just an FYI: this post has nothing to do with Killers from Space, either the thing or the movie by the same name. I just used it to draw your attention to an even more immediate problem: Killers from Underground! Say what you want about Big Green. Sure, we may not be the most successful band around. And true enough, we don't perform very much ... or even at all, really. And it's fair to say that we spend much of our band time recording stuff in the basement, releasing the resulting tracks buried in incomprehensible podcasts. Further, you wouldn't be wrong to say that we are gaunt, pigeon-toed freaks with bad builds and gray hair. Right ... are you done saying what you want? This is getting depressing. Oh, yeah - my point is simply that, even though we don't deliver on a lot of what you might expect from an indie rock band, we try to be useful in little ways. Like giving you pointers on how to handle a disgruntled mad scientist. Or tips on personal robot assistant ma...