Hammer Mill Days

Ask not what Big Green has been doing for you this week. Ask what you can do for Big Green. And yes, I am cribbing from John F. Kennedy - that's how we roll around here. It's all JFK, all the time. Interestingly, president Kennedy did have a role in Big Green's history, albeit a minor one. Back in the day when we were fighting the cat for the scraps that she had just wrestled away from some mice, we would record in our childhood bedrooms, our mother's living room, some spare room - wherever we could fit a cassette machine and some battered instruments. (Those instruments!) Matt and I would bang around the way we still do now, hammer together a song, then release it on cassette. And when I say "release", I mean something like tossing it out into the middle of the road and hoping someone chances upon it. (You know - essentially like posting it on the Internet ... without the Internet part.) Well, many of those cassette collections were made up of Christmas s...

The president this week took a break from his 3-week vacation to issue an existential threat against a sovereign nation. If the intention was to intimidate the target country, well, it didn't work so well - the DPRK responded with a thinly veiled threat to launch missiles at Guam, home to 160,000 people and two major U.S. airbases. That prompted another nuclear threat from Trump. Then he threatened to invade Venezuela. This may turn out to be the longest summer vacation in history. In some respects, this feels very familiar. The Defense Intelligence Agency leaking an intel assessment about North Korea being able to miniaturize nuclear weapons to a warhead-ready size - that sounds like the Iraq war run-up to me. Clearly someone likes the idea of another catastrophic conflict on the Korean peninsula. The cheap, sloppy trash-talking, though, is different. The only close to comparable incidents I can think of from other presidencies is, perhaps, W. Bush calling Kim Jong Il a "py...

You can't really expand it, Mitch. If you did, it would be too damn big for the tube. Then there's the drag coefficient ... you know, that thing you were telling me about yesterday, what the fuck .... WHY CAN'T WE JUST WORK ON MUSIC? Sheesh. Back again, here at the Cheney Hammer Mill, with our mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee working on yet another crackpot scheme to make us all RICH while carrying us place to place more efficiently and, I don't know, churning out mounds and mounds of cole slaw. Last week it was the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module - that patented modular space station component that Mitch was obsessing over. Now he's focused like a particle beam on Hyperloop technology, the brain child of entrepreneur/inventor Elon Musk, a man Mitch loathes, envies, and idolizes all at the same time. (He's got mood issues, frankly.) What is Hyperloop? Well ... the best I can describe it is as follows. If you're of a certain age (and I most certainly...

I'm not going to spend a lot of column space on the foibles of the Trump White House, entertaining as they may be. You've heard it all, right? Everything about Scaramucci, Priebus, and whoever the fuck. Hey, we elected a clown-car cartoon character president - we should expect this. What's really much more disturbing is what they've been up to behind the screen of all this palace intrigue. Some of it is fairly clear, like the disingenuous attack on the Affordable Care Act and Medicaid (i.e. Trump's repeated promises that the new bill would be better, that everyone would be covered, and that premiums and co-payments would be low). Some is not so obvious, and the devil in this administration is truly in those details. Take the Sessions Justice Department (please). Reporting this week has indicated that they are redirecting the Civil Rights Division to look into cases of reverse discrimination in college admissions. They are denying it up and down, but it would in n...

No, you can't have it. I'm not going to say it again. NO. Keep it up and you're going to bed without your sawdust ration. I said NO, damn it! Oh, god .... all right. Well, there you have it, friends of Big Green. That's how mad scientists get what they want - nag, nag, freaking nag. Mitch Macaphee can keep at it for longer than any four year old. Next thing you know I'll be taking him to Water Safari. Such a child! And I ask you, what's worse than a child with the power to reverse gravity? Nothing I can think of. What was Mitch asking for? Glad you asked. I blame NPR, frankly. They did one of their glib as fuck little morning stories about something called the Bigelow Expandable Activity Module (or BEAM), a kind of collapsible space station section that can be puffed out like a popcorn kernel when they have some use for it in orbit. Handy little thing, really, and Mitch can see linking two or three of them together and mounting some ion drive propulsion unit...

Another one of those weeks spent drinking from the political firehose. I'm going to try to run through a few of the items that have been top-of-mind for me over the last few days. Let me know if my list looks anything like yours. Yemen Horror. The WHO reported that cholera is spreading like wildfire in war-ravaged Yemen, infecting more than 400,000 people with almost 1,900 deaths attributed to the outbreak. This is in addition to the many thousands killed by the Saudi-led and U.S.-supported terror bombing of this unfortunate country. Since Congress is all about sanctions this week, one would hope they would consider slapping a few on the freaks running this horror show from Riyadh. Fat fucking chance. This is a bipartisan atrocity and it will only stop when we insist upon it. Cracker abuse. Trump is unloading on his pal Jeff Beauregard Sessions, talking as though the AG's job consists entirely of running interference against any investigative probes that come too near the...

It's the dog days, or at least we think it is. So where are the freaking dogs, then? Somewhere a dog is barking. Well, dogs or no, it's hot as hell out there, so it's probably a good day to lurk in the shadows of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill and rifle through the archives of the last 30 years of Big Green history. Fortunately, I have Marvin (my personal robot assistant) on hand to help me with the heavy lifting. Yes, he can lift very heavy things. (It's the putting them down part that he's not so good at.) There's a safe in the attic, but I think we'll stick to the file cabinets and banker boxes in the main hammer assembly room. Got a few old tapes, obviously ... more than a few. When we started out as a band, we recorded on wire ... I mean, tape . (We couldn't afford wire.) Our first reel-to-reel was a broken down SONY machine that my dad bought used at some point. We recorded a few songs on old, thrice recorded tapes, though I couldn't tell...