Hammer Mill Days

I told you what I saw, Mitch. What else can I say? If you choose not to believe me, well that's your affair. All I can tell you is that I know a primordial proto-whale when I see one, and I SAW one. Oh, hi. As you can see, our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, and I are having a little scientific disagreement. I am making an empirical argument that primitive whale ancestors still roam the earth, whereas Mitch is advancing a kinetic argument of sorts. In other words, he threw a chair at me. Fortunately, my reflexes are still relatively sound for a man of my years and I was able to duck quickly enough to make it a near miss. Then came the brick bats. Let's just say that I lost the argument, not so much on the merits. More on the bruises. Ouch. I never suspected Mitch would get so worked up about the field of paleontology. He's more of a physicist, chemist, bomb maker. You never know what he's going to cook up next. Last week he was muttering something about somebod...

Another week loaded with shiny objects. Trump letting loose a series of crackhead tweets, conducting his campaign-style Klan rallies, stoking conspiracy theories tweeted by his mutant son. But in the midst of all of this (and so much more), a lot is happening throughout this administration that is threatening to do lasting, perhaps permanent damage to the nation and the world. Most of this is not even reported on, mainly because the Trump/Russia investigation and related prosecutions provide such an attractive source of content for our TV networks in particular. CNN, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, etc. .... they have been pointing cameras at this guy since he started his run for president in 2015. As I've said before, it's the reality show that took over the universe, and since the networks love the reality TV format (and viewers tune in), they are taking this opportunity to expand their audiences and rake in some serious bank. They have been busy as hell, too. Just this week, the unbeliev...

Someone's knocking at the front gate - I can hear them. Anti Lincoln, can you see who it is? No, of course you can't see them from down here in the basement. I meant go up stairs and take a look. Jesus .... how did you EVER serve as president? (Actually, I think I may now know the answer.) Well, I spent this week counting the number of balls I've dropped since the start of the summer. And I don't mean ping pong balls. No, I'm talking about projects started and never finished, plans laid but not implemented, sandwiches assembled but not eaten, sentences commenced but never .... what was I saying? Oh yeah. I never finish anything, and this summer is no exception, folks. First there was the archive project. I will admit, I did get further on this one than any of the others. I've resurrected about 200 songs, by my rough count, all recorded in the eighties and early to mid nineties. I have the files ... I haven't done anything with them, but I HAVE them. And ...

The knives were out for Iran again this week ... not that that's all that different from other weeks in America. Trump dropped an open threat on Twitter, his preferred channel for delivering such messaging. I know he's never read it, but his little all-cap tweet is a blatant violation of Article 2 (principle 4) of the U.N. Charter, which, ratified by the U.S., is the supreme law of the land: All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Purposes of the United Nations. Of course, this principle gets violated all the time without consequence, particularly by our own leaders and those of our allied nations. Not sure how, exactly, this prohibition made its way into this document back in the day when the United States was the sole remaining power and the first-ever superpower in world history. We had an enormous han...

I know it's the dead of summer, but I'm tired of all this drag-and-drop bullshit. Can't we take a break and hang out in the courtyard for an hour or two, sipping cool drinks and listening to some boss tunes? No? Sheesh . Okay, so yes, I'm frittering away my summer in the basement of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, keeping my head down, concentrating on the task before me. What task is that, you may ask? And well you may. Archiving, my friends, archiving. Plowing through decades of audio tape, capturing songs that have never been committed to a hard drive; songs recorded on primitive ribbons of tape, stored away in shoeboxes, and nearly forgotten. Literally hundreds of recordings, the overwhelming majority made by Matt in the privacy of my abandoned bedroom. It's an exhausting undertaking, particularly when you are as work-averse as I am. Still, I've made pretty good progress. I've gotten most of them transferred to digital, and now I'm pruning arou...

This has been a hair-on-fire week in American politics, prompted by Trump's bizarre behavior at his ill-prepared Helsinki summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin. There were calls of treason and shameful behavior in the face of a principal "enemy", "adversary", "foe"... whatever Russia may be in the eyes of mainstream politicians and pundits. You know the facts - Trump, of course, contradicted his intelligence advisors, suggesting that he believes Putin's denials regarding the hack against Democrats in particular and the electoral system in general during the 2016 race. He then walked it back - and I mean this literally - like a five-year-old might; that, of course, was enough for those occasional Republican critics of the president. He misspoke on one phrase ... THAT clears it up. That said, the coverage of this series of incidents has been so over the top it's almost dizzying. Mainstream center-left commentary has portrayed this perfor...

I spy with my little eye ... a boiler. Right over there. You can't see that? It's as big as a commercial refrigerator, for chrissake! What? Oh, right ... I forgot to turn the lights on. Been here too long, man ... I know this place like the back of my hand. Well, here we are in the Cheney Hammer Mill basement, trying to survive the onslaught of another cycle of global warming-fueled temperature extremes. You have to fill you time with something, right? As I mentioned last week, we tossed around the idea of doing another interstellar tour. That is to say, I tossed it to Marvin (my personal robot assistant), he tossed it back, then I tossed it to Antimatter Lincoln, and he dunked it into the ancient cistern. Call me Kreskin, but it seems to me like nobody wants to do this tour thing. Somehow it's not a surprise. We haven't been live on stage in a few years, and at that point, the idea of it starts to seem alien and hostile. Now, as it happens, most of our interstellar...