Hammer Mill Days

Here's my counter offer. You can use the counter any time you want, even when we're having brunch in the kitchen on alternate Sundays, as per our agreement, volume 3, chapter 5, subsection 4, paragraph 2 (see also sources in footnote 845). Now what do you say? Yeah, here we are, making a deal with the devil, folks. Yes, I'm talking about those crazy squatters who invaded and occupied the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our makeshift home, sometime during the summer, consigning us and our various hangers-on to the potting shed in the courtyard. We're attempting to reach some understanding with them, but it's a bit more complicated than I had imagined. Apparently one of these yahoos is a contract lawyer. Doesn't look it. Anyway, our draft agreement for the return of Big Green to the Cheney Hammer Mill is ... well, it's thick as your ass, maybe thicker. Lots of wherefores and what-have-you's, which is fine, because what have we right now but big fat noth...

Yes, I watched the Democratic presidential debate on CNN this past week, god help me. The best thing I can say about it is that CNN dropped the dramatic WWF candidate intro segment and went straight into the questions. That said, the fact that there were twelve candidates on stage made the event a ridiculous parody of an actual debate. Candidates are given 75 seconds to respond to a question, and 45 seconds for rebuttals. It is simply impossible to grapple with the complex issues facing our nation in any meaningful way within those time constraints. The format drives a kind of Twitter-like approach to discourse, complete with the trolling. Seventy-five seconds is something like 125 words. Try talking a nation out of decades of for-profit healthcare or a century of oil dependence in that little time. It's a format that greatly favors the status quo. And the status quo had many defenders last night. As was predicted the previous week by talking heads and broadcast journalists, u...

Why does it rattle so much? Is that the low end putting out all that noise? Hmmmm ... well, there's only one thing for it. Grease. Lots of grease. Oh, hi. As is so often my affectation, I will behave as if you just came upon me in a coffee shop or squatting down on the curbside, changing a flat tire. Of course, neither of those things is true in this particular universe, but sometimes we like to act as though we're interacting on a more personal level and not merely connecting via that series of tubes known as the internet. Okay ... that's a long way of saying, welcome, once again, to Hammer Mill Days, the Big Green blog, where we're liable to burn half a column just saying hi. Uh ... hi. We're at the mixing stage of our current project. What project is that, you may ask? (And well you may.) It's the next musical episode of Ned Trek, of course, and we've been working on a raft of eight songs designed to keep the plot moving forward. Matt and I have been...

It's probably best for me to start by saying that I was always against U.S. military involvement in the Syrian civil war - this was the case during the Obama administration and it remains the case now. But because our troops have been there in numbers exceeding 1,000 for years now, and that we have worked them into Syria's complex web of security guarantees, alliances, and bitter enmities, it seems only right that we should consider the consequences of whatever decisions we make, whether it means pulling troops out or putting more in. This is a situation in which every power is in it for its own gain, and that includes the United States. That's why the goddam war is still going on ... and thanks to Trump this week, it's likely to move into a new and more deadly phase. The Syrian Kurds, who made the mistake of fighting for us as part of the conflict in their country, are now in the crosshairs of a massive military operation by Turkey - an incursion into northern Syria ...

Hey, wait ... isn't it my turn? No? What the hell - you just had it. I'm not going to listen to another of your drunken yarns, you ne'er do well. Jesus, what a stupid tradition. Let's start over. Oh, hi. Well, since we're living so close to the ground these days, an almost traditional life style you might say, we've decided to take on some of the old practices, just to keep in step with our new way of living. Not sure what ancient peoples dwelt in potting sheds ... perhaps there was a Potsylvania after all. (Jay Ward may have been onto something!) Nevertheless, we thought it might make the time go by a bit faster to appropriate some old traditions that we'd seen on TV at some point. One was the talking stick. You know how it works, right? Whoever has the stick can speak to the group, tell a tale, reveal a secret, cop to a fault or instance of wrongdoing, etc. Then they pass it along. Or sometimes they don't, and you have to grab it from their ass. Go...

I don't read a lot of books these days, given my lack of personal time, but right now I'm reading a book I think every American should read. It's called Kill Anything That Moves , by Nick Turse, it's a few years old (maybe five or six), and it lays out the systematic slaughter of the U.S. war in Vietnam in sickening detail. Meticulously researched and documented, this book is a really useful guide to archival sources on what was certainly one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century and one that the United States has never come to terms with. Here is a brief excerpt that describes what was done in the American effort to pacify the Binh Dinh region of South Vietnam in 1966: During the six weeks of [Operation] Masher/White Wing, from late January to early March 1966, the 1st Cavalry Division fired 133,191 artillery rounds in to Binh Din's heavily populated An Lao Valley and Bong Son Plain. The navy added 3,213 rounds from its ships. The air force launched ...

Shore it up, boys. Let's keep the roof on this thing. Sure, it used to be the floor, but when something's keeping the rain off your head, it's a roof. Unless it's a hood ... or an umbrella. Never mind. Hey, well, here we are again, man. Trying to keep a broken home together. I don't mean that daddy left and ain't coming back (even though that's roughly true); I mean we're fixing a hole where the rain came in ... and it's the size of the freaking roof. We're borrowing wood from the floor to shore up the roof. We're borrowing planks from the south wall to block up the gaping hole in the north wall. This is like the fabled Ship of Theseus. This isn't a home ... it's a philosophical paradox! Is it the same potting shed as when we moved here? Only your logic professor can say for certain. Sure, sometimes the demands of home ownership (or home occupancy) keep us from our real work, the work we were put here to do. And that's a good ...