Hammer Mill Days

Captain's log, star date May 17, 2019 ... which just happens to be the same as today's "Earth" date. Strange that those two calendars would coincide on this of all days! But no matter. Yes, Big Green is currently en route to Barnard's star, coming off a successful string of performances on Neptune (5/12) and on the third planetoid in the Proxima system (5/15). Tickets were pretty hard to get, so if you're reading this you probably didn't see either of those shows. Our performances were live-streamed, but given the vast distances from Earth, the stream won't get to terrestrial devices until sometime in late 2027. (That's what passes for "live" on an interstellar tour.) So ... the Ned Trek Live Springtime Extravaganza Tour 2019 is off to a barn burner of a start, at least according to our publicist. Frankly, between the two of us, I consider any Neptune show I can walk away from a success. When your audience is submerged in a lake of f...

As I write this, we are witnessing a shameful pissing match between the state legislators and governors of Republican-dominated states to see which group of Christian Taliban can pass the most restrictive abortion ban in the nation and spawn the lawsuit that will result in the reversal of Roe v. Wade. Ohio and Georgia were taking the lead last week, the latter passing a "fetal heartbeat" bill that would make the procedure a felony after six weeks, no exceptions other than saving the life of the mother. (The bill was signed by Georgia's illegitimate governor, Brian Kemp.) Not to be outdone, Alabama this week sent to its Nazi governor (Kay Ivey) a very near to total, outright abortion ban, again, criminalizing the procedure. Texas, not surprisingly, is working on making abortion a capital crime. Probably the only good thing that can be said about this orgy of ignorance is that we don't have to listen to these right-wing boneheads claim disingenuously that they care a...

Electrodes to power. Turbines to speed. Our sorry asses to perdition. Prepare for launch sequence start. Roger! Roger! Stay away from that engine nozzle! Man, that guy's an idiot. I don't understand how he ends up on every mission. Well, we're about to launch our spring Interstellar Tour, which we've dubbed the Ned Trek Live Springtime Extravaganza Tour 2019 . Not a moment too soon, I should add. It's getting pretty strange down here on planet Earth, and we'd just as soon watch the various developments from a safe distance of maybe 75 light years. From that remote prospect, all of the cares and woes of human kind are reduced to a mere point of light. A sobering thought ... unless you're drinking that basement hooch Mitch Macaphee has been working on recently. Not one of his better experiments. Speaking as someone who's about to embark on a perilous deep space excursion in a ramshackle craft, I can say I'm more afraid of imbibing that noxious beve...

The more I watch TV talk shows, the more I realize that they live and die by a simple maxim: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. That's the principle that puts John Brennan, Norman Podhoretz, Bill Kristol, Max Boot, and others of their ilk on centrist-liberal shows on MSNBC. I suppose it's not all that surprising that the election of Donald Trump would result in the rise of a lowest common denominator resistance, such that open-throated advocates of the Iraq War and other disasters have spent the last three years nursing their reputations back to health, hour by hour, on Morning Joe and other platforms. I'm not the first, certainly, to point out that the left suffers under reactionary presidents as the broad opposition tends to focus all their energy on defense of existing policies under attack, at the expense of breaking new ground. That's understandable ... but do we really have to make common cause with Bill Kristol? Really ? Well, it's worse than that. Bec...

Okay, so what if it doesn't come back? What happens to your little experiment then, Einstein? What the ... PUT THE STICK DOWN! Oh, hi. Yes, things get a little contentious at times around the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. I was just having a conversation with our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, who is doing some tests on a new propulsion system he's developing. Suffice to say it's the kind of propulsion system we would need to carry us to the far-flung interstellar venues that have been added to our upcoming tour in recent days. We haven't secured transport yet, owing to our lack of resources, so Mitch has taken it upon himself to custom design a deep-space conveyance that will meet our needs ... and then some. Trouble is, he is ... well .... a crazy-ass mofo, and because of that simple fact, he can't just use existing technology to build his spacecraft. Oh, no ... he has to innovate an entirely new form of propulsion. Don't ask me the particulars - it ...

I don't know if it was at the start of this week or at the end of last week, but at some point recently I wondered aloud what became of the Trump administration's coup plan in Venezuela. It seemed to have fizzled rather badly, despite their best efforts ... but then this week it sprang back to life like Frankenstein's monster. Washington's hand-picked maximum leader of that unfortunate country, Juan Guaido, appeared in a cell-phone video surrounded by what appears to be a handful of soldiers, declaring himself president once again. This is, of course, not a coup, we're told, because officials of the United States government have decided that Guaido is the legitimate president of Venezuela. Nothing screams freedom more than leaders selected by the regional hegemon. Naturally, our execrable National Security Advisor John Bolton and our equally fragrant Secretary of State Michael Pompeo are behaving as if whatever they say randomly just has to be true. Pompeo cla...

All right, then. Ready? One, two, three, four .... wait, whaaat? That's not how that song starts. The bagpipes come in on the third verse, not right at the beginning. Where's that screaming guitar, Mitch? You promised me a screaming guitar! Oh, man. It's really been too long since we got out on the star-dusty trail and played a few remote venues. Pulling together a live show is hard when you're this rusty. In fact, it's starting to make interstellar space travel seem trivial by comparison. But what the hell, we're doing it - Big Green is going on another galactic tour, assuming we can find a spaceship worthy of such a journey. No matter what the difficulties may be, the daunting challenges ... we will not be daunted. Forward! Forward into the breech, me lads! So much for the motivational speech. Actually, I think the toughest problem we have on this project is, well, personnel. We're a little thin on the ground here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill....