Hammer Mill Days

Did you find any yet? Hmmm ... I was sure they'd be here somewhere. How about now? Nothing? Okay. Keep digging. Great hopping organoids, this archaeology business is harder than it looks. Idle hands do the devil's work, or so they say. Here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill (our squat house), we like to try to keep busy just so that we don't get into trouble. Sure, you might think being a musician would be enough, and well, it should be. But you can play and play and play until the cows come home. Then what have you got? A whole herd of cows, and no place for them to graze. Who do those cows belong to, anyhow? Right ... well, I've wandered a bit, but you get the point. So sure, we make music, but in between all that we like to involve ourselves in scientific endeavors ... at least in the social sciences. (We leave the hard sciences to our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee.) This week it's archaeology. Why that field? Well, we spotted an article about Neander...

The 100-day mark is fast approaching for the Trump administration, and this week they kicked it into high gear in an attempt to create the impression that they accomplished something over the last three months - namely, something that was on the President's list of promises he made over the course of his craven campaign last year. With this in mind, they tossed out a few desperate efforts towards meaningful legislation, one of which being a one-page tax break proposal announced by Mnuchin on Wednesday. This is a clear return to the G.O.P. presidential playbook, in a Trump kind of way. Of course, it smells more like a scam, the sparsely written outline providing very little detail or guidance for what would likely be a contentious legislative drafting process. But the outlines are there, and what it means effectively is that old Pappy Tax Cut is back once again. We haven't seen Pappy since the days of Dubya Bush and his high-earner tax cut that blew a huge hole in the budget -...

Yeah, turn the bass drum up a little in my headphone mix. Yeah, that's enough. That's good. Okay, dial it back ... Too loud. STOP!! Christ on a bike. Can't you turn a knob in a direction other than clockwise? No? Okay. Good to know. As you may have surmised, we have resorted to using Marvin (my personal robot assistant) as a sound engineer in the makeshift studio we maintain at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. Not the optimal choice, I admit, but hey, look - we only have two hands. Actually, between us, we have four, but - and this is important - WE'RE USING ALL FOUR OF THEM. I thought Marvin, being a robot, might be a bit more precise in his manipulations of various sound parameters, but it appears that Mitch Macaphee (our mad science advisor) cut a few corners when he put Marvin together. His wrist joints only turn one way, it turns out. What the fuck. When you are effectively a pop duo ... and I think Matt and I constitute the duo part, at least ... you need to ...

Some election news this week. Jon Ossoff, Democratic party candidate in the Georgia 6th congressional district "jungle" primary topped 48% of the vote tally, which is impressive in Tom Price/Newt Gingrich territory but still a couple of points below an outright victory. As always, the Republicans furiously worked the refs on this race, establishing the easy-bake narrative that Ossoff needed to win an outright maclassjority and that anything short of that would be an abject failure. The mainstream media, of course, adopted this line because it's simple and requires zero analysis (a lot of stories run this way), so the news shows the morning after the election were full of Democrats falling short postmortems. Useful. Okay, because I am at heart a fair person, I will admit that the likes of Joe Scarborough said something that I actually agreed with this past Wednesday - something to the effect that Democrats need to rediscover getting out the vote, knocking on doors, calli...

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 ...