Hammer Mill Days

There's my pocket watch. And no, it's not a proper pocket watch, just a wrist watch I keep in my pocket because my wrists get sore when I wear it. As a result, the crystal is scratched to the point where it always looks like 3:54 last Wednesday. So .... happy Wednesday, everybody! What's new this week in Big Green land? Well, I'm guessing there's more news coming out of regular old Greenland (That's part of Scandinavia!), though they have the advantage of belonging to Denmark. It's been suggested to us more than once that we should just ask Denmark to annex us, like the even bigger Greenland, so that we would have more to talk about on our blog and podcast. Another good suggestion, people. Keep them rolling in! In all seriousness, though (and I'm making my most serious face now), we have been working our fingers to the bone on our next raft of Big Green songs. We've even worked a few of our toes to the bone as well. (You don't know hardship...

This probably isn't a wise practice, but I sometimes view Morning Joe as a bellwether of establishment opinion, particularly regarding foreign policy. Their panel covers the spectrum from neocons to liberal interventionists - a narrow span to say the least. And they appear to be as happy as the proverbial pig in shit about Trump's recent cruise missile attack in Syria. Both the liberal interventionist wing and the neocon wing have been highly critical of Obama's failure to start a unilateral, extra-constitutional war with Syria back in 2013, so this past week was sweet validation for them all. As a group, they seem anxious for evidence that Trump's administration is "normalizing" and settling in to the usual, conventional insanity, so they tend to jump on every lurch towards the institutional consensus. And clearly, there is a solid, institutional consensus on American foreign policy. It's a relatively small box that contains, on one end, the Obama appr...

What's that rattling you hear? Could be the sound of Tomahawk missiles. Or maybe it's just a loose screen in the upstairs window. Those may be the same exact thing, in effect. But there is a third possibility, and that is the April THIS IS BIG GREEN podcast. We've got another boatload of sound for you this month - here's a brief look inside the ship's hold (just to overextend that little metaphor) ... NED TREK 32: All Our Festeryears. A take-off on the "All Our Yesteryears" episode in the original Star Trek series (I believe their second or third to the last episode ever), Willard, Ned, Pearle, and Sulu pay a visit to a strangely deserted world, the entire population of which has retreated into old B movies on VHS tapes. The caretaker of the library (or Blockbuster Video) and his various doppelgangers are played by Ronald Reagan. Ned and Sulu have to deal with cheap-ass cinematic cowboys, whereas Willard and Pearle face-off against cave men. Kind of ...

Another week on foreign policy, mostly because it has been so heinous lately. The gas attack in Syria was particularly upsetting, in part because there was video footage of the aftermath (unlike in the case of the U.S.'s Al Ghayil raid in Yemen that killed a score of civilians, including nine children, or the bombing in Mosul last week). The Syrian regime, once again, is doing the one thing they do in response to a restive population: kill and torture. They literally know nothing else. That said, there seems to be a universal media consensus that the United States should fly its bombers in there and start blowing the place apart, as if that has ever made anything better over the past 50-60 years. (Spoiler alert: it hasn't. It has made things exponentially worse.) Then there was the missile launch in North Korea. Deliberately provocative, yes, though again, our military rules on that peninsula - we're constantly running joint exercises with the South Korean military that c...

Not running again, eh? Try knocking it upside the head again. Harder. HARDER! Oh, wait ... you knocked its head off. That's probably too hard. Oh well.... Hey, welcome to the house of Big Green - that abandoned hammer mill we call home, because all of the groups live together. Just trying to get down to recording some new material, old material ... whatever! If we can just get our technology to work for five minutes. (Actually, three and a half minutes would do, since this is pop music.) Seriously, we've got some old gear, folks. It's almost as old as our asses. I'm not even talking tape recorders .... I'm talking wire recorders. I'm talking those wax record cutting machines they used when John-boy was being interviewed by a radio station on The Waltons after he got swindled by the vanity press dude. (Oh, you thought I forgot, didn't you? Mr. TV Swindler!) Ahem. Anyhow, we really are running on three cylinders down in Big Green's clubhouse recordin...

Another turn at the fire hose. Man, this is kind of dizzying. We've just seen a week in which the President has essentially undone the clean power plant rules, scuttled the Paris Accords on climate change, approved the Keystone XL pipeline project, and escalated his attacks on undocumented residents and on the poor miserable souls in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen who cope with our bombs on a daily basis. I could write five posts, but that would take the rest of human history, so suffice with this sorry tirade on foreign policy. I didn't want to let the week go by without saying something about the hundred-plus killed in a coalition raid in Mosul. Civilian deaths have been on the rise in that conflict since our military began its air assault on the more densely populated western side of Mosul. Well, that's predictable enough. We are fighting the legacy of the previous decade's catastrophic policy, which was itself a response to another previous decade's catastrophic polic...

Got this song running through my head. It's one of Matt's from some time ago. I get that a lot, actually. Our entertainment center hasn't worked in ages, so when we're not playing I have to rely upon the jukebox in my mind for my entertainment. And just now it's playing Big Green circa 1989, maybe. Couple weeks ago. The lyric goes like this: Thought we were madly in love but we were just plain mad I always thought we were in love But we were mad, just mad Under a Gothic sky we heard an ancient choir In an amphitheater we compiled notes and prayed aloud We held our breath and heard the voice of uncommon sense We dropped our eyes and saw the floor mosaic move We were in need of uncommon sense We met the face of foolishness In the torrential rain we still open the mail We still shake the pieces Still building boats unsafe to sail We were badly in need of some uncommon law We were sadly in need of some corrective lens We were in need of unc...