Hammer Mill Days

Mitch, I'll be frank ... I don't think this is a good idea. I know it's the middle of the night and most likely no one can see us, but that contraption makes a lot of noise and ... well ... never mind. Oh, hi. Yeah, I'm trying to talk our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee off of the ledge again. This time I mean it literally - he's up on top of the Cheney Hammer Mill, all worked up in a lather about the recent news from deep space. Did you hear about it? Well, in case you haven't, the space probe Rosetta has crashed into Comet 67P/Churyumov--Gerasimenko after having gathered data about what that cosmic snow cone is made of. This kind of news always sets Mitch off - he's apparently got a hand in every celestial body from here to Andromeda, I'm gradually discovering. He's a bit like Heath on the Big Valley. Every time a stranger comes to town, it turns out that Heath had "sworn to keel him" at some point. (I always wondered why brother ...

It's been another one of those weeks. Not sure how many more I can stand. This election is enough of a nightmare without the regular drumbeat of disasters, but I guess it always works like this on some level. Maybe I'm getting more sensitive in my dotage. In any case, this is what I've been thinking about this week: Lives not mattering. Police shootings of black men in Tulsa, Charlotte, and outside of San Diego demonstrate that this is not getting any better and perhaps is getting much worse. Whereas there has always been a degree of indifference about these incidents, as more and more take place without just resolution, people will tend to become inured to the issue, just as they have with mass shootings. And of course, in at least two of these incidents, details about the dead man's background have been made known, including brushes with the law. They did this with Patrick Dorismond back in the later nineties and it's become a favorite tactic: If you're bla...

Wait a minute. Here they come again! Everybody DOWN! Damn it. Okay, that was just a pizza delivery to the neighbors. You can all stand up again. Oh, hi. Kind of caught us at a bad time, actually. We are in the midst of a coordinated drone attack. No, not the military kind they use overseas. These are domestic drones of the kind you can buy at the corner store. As you may have heard, there are now hundreds of thousands of these suckers. The skies are black with them. One flock covers three whole states, and when they move ... oh, it's like THUNDER! (No, wait ... that was the buffalo, as described by a space archeologist on Star Trek. Sorry.) Now, when I say "attack", I don't exactly mean they are targeting us. It's just that there are so freaking many of these things, it starts to feel like an assault after a while. The pizza delivery joint down the street is using one. So is the florist. And last week our nasty neighbors bought one for their fourteen year old,...

There seems to be considerable interest in third party candidates this year, even though neither of the major/minor candidates is anything to write home about. Jill Stein is a smart person with whom I agree across a broad range of policies, but her notion of how presidential elections work is severely stunted and bizarre. Moreover, the party she represents is almost a total waste of space - an environmental activist party that only appears once every four years to compete in the presidential race. When it comes to organizing, they're not exactly Saul Alinsky. Gary Johnson, on the other hand, is clearly not the brightest ex-governor on the porch and hasn't made much of a case for why young people should give their vote to a ticket that's floated in part with Koch money, most likely. Perhaps his supporters are not aware that he would slash spending on just about any program that ever benefited them in any way. If American style libertarianism is about anything, it's abo...

Sometimes if you're up early enough in the morning, you can see the first rays of the sun breaking over the ruins of the abandoned mill next door. I think they made broom handles there or something. Now it's just some disheveled wreck that the sun rises over. Hey .... been there. Yes, friends, it's been many, many suns and even more moons since I started this blog about Big Green. We now have posts that stretch back nearly as far as those rays of sunlight. A rich body of balderdash, and it's getting balder all the time. Sometimes you forget where this all began - in some crappy dive on the west end of the city, the walls smelling of beer, dog crap on the stage, and a bartender who hates your ass. A lot of music careers start that way. Ours, on the other hand, was never anything else. (Yes, we are like most bands - spectacularly unsuccessful and damn proud of it.) So we took to the hammer mill and started hammering out recordings. That was in the nineties. Since then...

The polls are tightening, and it's no surprise. The Clinton campaign has spent the summer on the sidelines, courting centrist republicans and waiting for Trump to collapse under the sheer weight of his contradictions and xenophobic rhetoric. That strategy has been a dismal failure. Young people and the left are drifting away to third-party dead-end candidates or to simply sitting on their hands, mostly because the Clintons have done virtually nothing to attract them and plenty to piss them off, like naming fracking advocate Ken Salazar as transition chief and courting the approval of the likes of John Negroponte. When you see Trump ahead in Ohio, that's down to the fact that fewer left-leaning members of the Obama coalition are self-identifying as likely voters. That's a recipe for disaster. What would light a fire under these voters? Well, a more determined and effective candidate, for one. The Democrats have a good platform, they just need to push it harder. But there...

What's this summer been about? I've got nothing. What's happening in your world, mansized tuber? Finally taking root, are we? At least someone accomplished something this summer. Look at me, talking to a plant. What is this world coming to? Though I suppose a lot of people talk to their plants. Though that kind of makes it sound like the mansized tuber is my property, and he is most certainly not. He is totally his own plant, a sovereign creature of the universe, a law unto himself ... a ... an oversized sweet potato riding around on a dolly. At least up until recently. The tuber planted himself in the courtyard, so you could say it's "goodbye, dolly!" for him. So, it has been an uneventful summer, to say the least. I'm not sorry to see it go. Probably the high point was when Mitch practically self-immolated over the news that his planet orbiting Proxima Centauri had been discovered. That broke us out of our stupor for a few days, at least. Just recent...