Hammer Mill Days

Look, Mitch ... you don't have to solve every problem with explosions. I know that cuts against the grain a bit, but at least try .... TRY not to dial it up to eleven every time you feel slighted. Thank you! Good day , sir! Jesus Christ on a bike. If you want anything done around here, you have to talk until you're green in the face. (That's probably how we ended up with the name Big Green, but I digress.) As I mentioned in passing last week, we are contemplating a little trip out into the nether regions of the solar system - not the most desirable area, it's true, but you have to book where they'll have you, right? Isn't that the first lesson of the music trade? Or maybe the second. The first is, play on, no matter what happens. Even if they set your banjo on fire, keep plucking. Then comes the bit about bookings. With me? Okay, so our plan was to fly out to KIC 8462852 with a brief stop at the as yet undiscovered Dwarf Planet at the edge of our solar syste...

We were treated to the third and final presidential debate this week, moderated by Chris Wallace of FoxNews. I can't decide which I found more annoying - the ridiculous utterances by the candidates themselves or the clueless pundit commentary on what a great moderator Wallace was. Maybe MSNBC is planning on hiring Wallace, I'm not sure - it seems like they were blowing him pretty hard the morning after, even though he apparently cribbed questions from the Peterson Institute and Operation Rescue. "Partial birth abortion," really? And no questions about climate change, of course. What a great news man. I could sit here an write about the obviously outrageous statements made by Trump over the 90 minute program, but you've probably heard enough of that. Suffice to say that the guy proves his unsuitability for the office of the presidency every time he opens his big yap. No one should need additional convincing, but alas ... this is America. No, what astonishes me is...

Going to Little Rock? But Big Green doesn't have any fans in Arkansas ... at least as far as I know. In fact, we don't have any fans south of the Mason Dixon line. Not since Cowboy Scat , anyway. What? Oh, okay .... never mind. Cheese and crackers, I thought we were going way on down south, but apparently we're going in a very different direction. Out towards KIC 8462852 with a brief stop at the as yet undiscovered Dwarf Planet at the edge of our solar system, and perhaps the undiscovered mystery giant planet as well. So at least our destinations are clear. That's the easy part. The not-so-easy part? Finding an agent who books that far out in the sticks, so to speak. (Actually, it's beyond the sticks and into the rocks.) We usually book ourselves in instances such as these, but times being what they are, it's helpful to have your interstellar ducks in a row before striking out into deep space. Speaking of ducks, we need to line up reliable transport as well....

Watching the Trump campaign this week, I am reminded of a collection of bad movie scenes my brother curated back in the 1990s under the title, Destination: Brain - we informally referred to it as "The Greatest Hits". As bad sci-fi movie aficionados, Matt and I loved to watch select passages from some of mankind's worst films but found it tiresome to sit through 90 minutes of boring dreck just to get to that "sweet spot" of bad acting, cheap specials, horrible dialog, etc. Matt cut together Destination: Brain so that we could enjoy those poetically bad movie moments extracted from context, and yet given new meaning by their juxtaposition with other poorly-wrought scenes. In any case, one of our favorite scenes was from a cheap-ass Frankenstein knock-off with a bunch of no-name actors and the clumsiest monster you ever saw. There is a climactic laboratory scene in which the monster's arm catches on fire, and he runs around the lab, screaming, trashing the ...

Well, at least we have a week to pack. That's something. What? Mitch sent himself back in time a week and is demanding that we leave now? For crying out loud, I hate when he does that. Okay, so you know that we live with a mad scientist. And if you know that, you probably knows that he has a tendency to obsess about outer space matters. Whether you knew it or not, it's happening again, this time over star KIC 8462852, which is flickering at odd interviews. Some have suggested that this is due to some undiscovered alien Megastructure, but I am skeptical. I cannot, however, say the same for Mitch, who is intrigued by this speculative feat of engineering know-how. He wants to see how they built THEIR megastructure so that he can build his OWN. The man has a competitive streak a parsec wide. Of course, it's not wise to ignore the entreaties of a mad scientist. And we've been collecting some dust in recent years, to be sure, so Big Green got its tiny heads together and d...

I know most people did not watch the quadrennial spectacle of the vice presidential debate this past Monday. For those who missed it, you didn't miss much. That said, it appears as though the corporate media in particular is intent on scoring this match-up on the basis of style points, thereby awarding the debate to former right-wing talk show host Mike Pence, one of the most reactionary men ever to adorn a major party presidential ticket. He was smooth and relaxed, the commentary goes, whereas Kaine was somewhat agitated and even rude. Well ... glad we're focusing on what matters. I have, however, heard some more interesting points made outside of the beltway punditocracy. Majority Report has been particularly good on this. Much of it confirms the impression I had at the time that Kaine was basically setting Pence up to defend, point by point, the most ridiculous and intemperate statements Trump has made during the campaign. Not rocket science, right? He was being pretty sy...

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 ...