Hammer Mill Days

I don't remember this room being this cramped. For crying out loud, what did they do to this place? Where's my plastic furniture? I was weeks collecting that bedroom set! Oh well ... there's bound to be a few glitches in any complex negotiation. The important thing is, we're back, baby! We've won the right to squat in our beloved Cheney Hammer Mill once again. And when I say "beloved", well ... that's a relative term. Next to the potting shed we've been crammed into all summer, the mill is a veritable palace. Sure, we have to share it with lunatics, but even that's not unprecedented. (Just take a look through our back pages and you'll see what I'm talking about.) All that said, there are a few restrictions on what we're going to be able to do as residents of the mill from here on out. Maybe it was a mistake to deputize Anti-Lincoln as our chief negotiator with the crazy upstairs neighbors. Our main thought was that he was, after...

There's no question but that Donald Trump is the worst president in my lifetime, and I'm fairly certain he's a serious contender for the worst president in American history. In most of the surveys I've seen, that position is held by pre-Civil War POTUS James Buchanan (1857 - 1861), but I think Buchanan's one distinction is under serious threat ... he may be surging to second worst by the end of Trump's current term. Of course, Trump doesn't see it that way. His ranging, incoherent cabinet meeting this past Monday gave him the opportunity to crow about the greatest economy in American history, his single-handed defeat of ISIS, his deal-making acumen, and so on. Sure, he got Turkey mixed up with Iraq at one point, but who's counting? He claims to be fulfilling a promise to bring American troops home, and one wishes that were true, but of course this claim - like everything else that comes out of his festering gob - is a cheap, transparent lie that wouldn...

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...