Hammer Mill Days

I think it's over there, in that cardboard box. No, no - not that one! The one under that one. Or the one under that. I don't know, just start opening boxes - I'll tell you when to stop. Oh, yes, that's right ... I have a fourth wall. Hello, then. What are we doing? Thanks for asking. We are digging through the Big Green archives again. And when I say "archives", I'm talking about something that's really much more rudimentary than that term suggests. Call it a series of boxes, some of which have the Kellogg rooster emblazoned on their side. Then there's those round Quaker Oats boxes .... I used to make pretend ham radios out of those. What we're searching for is, well, some ideas for this year's Christmas pageant extravaganza. Amazingly, there's a lot of holiday material that hasn't been released or even heard for the last ten years. Matt did, what, ten years of Christmas tapes, between 1986 and 1995, with one added on after tha...

With an environmental disaster underway in Houston and massive destruction in the Florida Keys, the Virgin Islands, and elsewhere around the Caribbean, it's fair to say that the 2017 hurricane season is off to an inauspicious start. We are completely unprepared for these climate change-fueled super storms, largely because we find ourselves unable to grapple with the fact that global warming is actually happening. Yes, I know - no storm can be directly attributed to climate change, but it does enhance the strength and volatility of the storms to a significant degree, and the effects are very much as predicted by climate scientists. There are people in this country - coastal urban mayors and the like - who have to face facts on this issue, but pretty much everyone else is free to ignore the obvious: that we are now living in a far more dangerous and unstable environment, and it's only going to get worse. The longer we play this denial game and pretend it doesn't exist, the ...

You sent it up the chute already? Okay, then ... well ... I WAS going to put the good stuff into it first, but I guess it's been long enough that people will settle for whatever they get. Oh, well ... maybe next month. Yes, you heard right - we've uploaded the September 2017 installment of THIS IS BIG GREEN , and this seems like a really good time to talk about what's inside that honking little MP3 file. Here goes: Ned Trek 33: The Nimrod Seven . Incredibly, the thirty-third episode of our Star Trek parody, Ned Trek. This one's based on the classic Star Trek first season episode entitled The Galileo 7 , in which Spock, McCoy, Scotty, and some toss-aways get their shuttlecraft stranded on a hostile ape-infested planet. Well, replace those three regulars with Perle, Coburn, and Sulu, change the shuttlecraft's name to "The Nimrod 7", then throw in Seb Gorka, Peter Lorre, the Nixon android, and a Mr. Stephanie or six and you've got a poorly-wrought m...

It's a little hard to sort out what to write about this week. The catastrophic hurricane that hit Texas or the one that's bearing down on Florida? North Korea? DACA? What the hell ... welcome to the Trump era, when everybody drinks from a firehose. What a non-stop freaking joy this administration is. I will leave to more able correspondents (like David Sirota ) the telling of how Trump and the congressional Republicans have worked overtime over the last few months to make east Texas more vulnerable to this kind of disaster. As unprecedentedly powerful storms line up to cause havoc around the Caribbean and up the coast, no doubt the climate change deniers will continue to strip away what little protection people have from flooding, the release of pollutants, and bankruptcy (particularly in a place like Puerto Rico). Then there's North Korea. Perhaps the most remarkable piece of this crisis is the total lack of voices in favor of doing the right thing. From the various talk...

This tape recorder has that Leroy Brown kind of problem. You know ... it looks like a jigsaw puzzle with a couple of pieces gone. Guess it must have been messin' with the wife of a jealous dehumidifier. All right, well, it's no secret that Big Green has a technology problem or two, even with an in-house mad science advisor like Mitch Macaphee. Our machines are aging, our circuits are frayed, our relays are frosted, and the electric bill's unpaid. (That was an accidental rhyme, by the way.) Most of our recording devices have at least one tooth missing. I've got an Evil Twin direct box that needs surgery. Our VS2480 deck has finally been retired for a system that's maybe six years newer (i.e. only nine years old). Hey ... if you're a real band, that shouldn't matter, right? Got a second-hand guitar and a panama hat? Start busking. Got a broken-down upright piano that's barely upright? Grab a tin cup and start pounding those dusty keys. That's the...

Just heard that Texas's asinine SB4 anti immigrant bill has been blocked by a federal judge a day before implementation. Now perhaps more undocumented people in Houston will make their way to safety in the midst of this catastrophic storm. It's conceivable that more than a few people's lives will have been saved by this decision, though it remains to be seen what will happen on appeal. Texas's useless governor is determined to push this point with the full support of the Trump Justice Department, furiously waving the bloody shirt of immigrant crime, murder, rape, etc., to make their bigoted followers happy. Of course, as police chiefs all over Texas and, really, across the nation know, the effect of this broad policy will be the precise opposite of what Trump, Sessions, and Abbott claim. It doesn't take a criminologist to understand how this works. The police don't have omniscience; they rely on people who see something to say something, as the slogan goes. Wi...

Anybody seen my tuning fork? No, damn it, THAT'S not it. That's my tuning spoon. I said fork , you moron. This .... place ! Oh, yeah ... hi out there. I'm just attempting to replace a string on a second hand guitar that's been lying around the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill since before we started squatting inside this big old drafty barn of a place. In as much as Big Green is a collectivist institution by nature, we make use of what resources avail themselves, utilizing only what we need to accomplish a mutually agreed-upon task, then replacing the surplus in such a way as to benefit all. Yes, we're all equal here. Except, of course, anti-Lincoln. Fuck that guy! Why am I restringing an old, abandoned guitar? Well, if it makes you feel any better, I'm doing it with used strings. We're scraping the bottom of the stewpot here, folks - I won't make any bones about it. (Typically, what you find at the bottom of the pot is not so much bones as sinew and fat...