Hammer Mill Days

 What’s to celebrate? Well … a lot of things, Mr. anti-President. Like, I don’t know … the lack of snow? Ummmm …. mail delivery? The persistence of our life-giving sun? Okay … I got nothing. Hey, what the hell, we appear to settling into a bit of a post-holiday funk here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted home. Like most bands of our generation, we like to get funky, and there’s not time like the post-holidays for a little funk-a-delic framming. Why not, right? Matt’s got a Fender Stratocaster for the first time in his life (sure, he’s had it for three years, but still … ). I’ve got my Korg SV-1 with funky clav sounds and something that sounds like a 70s Farfisa organ. So when it comes to post-holiday funk, we’re loaded for bear. It’s fair to say that we don’t have a reputation as a jam band. That doesn’t mean we haven’t done it a whole lot. Big Green rehearsals were usually just jam sessions, interrupted periodically by some swearing and hand waving....

It has been another one of those weeks, packed to the gills with news, mostly bad. Of course, this is not a bug but merely a feature of the times we live in, so I will make my usual lame effort at grappling with a small subset of what has been assailing us over the past few days in the final full week of the third year of Our Lord Trump, king of the chimps. Debate #7. Not at all sure I see the point of these corporate exercises in superficial political sparring. The CNN questioners were clearly excited to dig in to their “breaking news” story about what Bernie said to Elizabeth a couple of years ago in a private conversation. The moderator who queried Sanders on this when straight to Warren with a question that assumed he was lying in his response. I am disappointed in Warren, frankly, for perpetuating this line of attack. It plays on the odious claim the Sanders and his followers were misogynistic in their race against Clinton in 2016 – something Clinton alumni cling t...

Yes, I know the clothes washer is running. I was trying not to speak too loudly, but it appears to have overheard what I was saying earlier. This is a fine kettle of soup. Wait … what’s happening in the kitchen? Arrgh. Hi, out there in web land. Hope all is well with you. Over here in Big Green – land (not to be confused with big Greenland, the island), the year is getting off to a rocky start. Nothing too surprising in our world. It gets a bit annoying having to tip toe around this place, but we have to be more careful than usual, now that Mitch Macaphee, our mad science advisor, has finally delivered the big-ass Christmas present he warned us about late last year. We all thought he was just winding us up, but there actually was a rabbit in the hat, as it turns out, and well …. now it’s out. Now, I know what you’re all thinking: “Joe, Joe! What did Mitch get you? What’s the present? Tell us NOW! ” Just calm down children, and I’ll tell you. You’ve heard of the Intern...

Fuck all, what a week this has been. The Suleimani assassination has turned Trump’s disastrous approach to foreign policy up past eleven, and that is a positive danger to organized society. Domestic president Bam-Bam is dangerous enough, but give him a war that he has started himself and god only knows where the hell we’ll end up. It’s like someone let a chimp loose in the oval office, and after months on the job he’s going stir crazy, pulling levers, pressing buttons, and randomly throwing feces at his political enemies. Does this kind of governance really work for anyone? It’s like living on a very active volcano. We may have temporarily dodged a bullet this time, but nothing has fundamentally changed. Times like these I am grateful for podcasters, bloggers, and independent journalists. The mainstream press have been of very little use through this recent crisis. There is this insistence, for instance, on calling Suleimani a terrorist or a bad guy, over and over lik...

I had that piece of paper five minutes ago. Did you see it? Okay … was that before or after you started the fire in the fireplace? Before … I see. Well, I HAD a list of New Year’s resolutions all set to share with you, but apparently they have gone up in smoke. Sometimes when I ask Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to do something, he gets it done via the path of least resistance. Start a fire, I might say, and if he’s holding a piece of paper, whether it’s some scrap from the day before or the original Declaration of Independence, that becomes the means of ignition. (As an aside, if you’re wondering what happened to the original Declaration of Independence, well … ask Marvin.) Hmmm … let’s see if I can repeat them from memory. Here goes. Resolution #1: No disputes with our crazy neighbors . Hey, look … I know they’re annoying and randomly cruel, but they live upstairs and they’re not going anywhere. The least we can do is make an effort to be more tolerant. ...

President Bam-Bam has started off the new year with incoherent threats against Iran, and it appears as if the entire corporate media establishment is pretty much on the same page as him. I was greeted on New Year’s morning by the usual cavalcade of retired generals (e.g., Barry McCaffrey, etc.) and inside-the-Pentagon correspondents (e.g. Hans Nichols, etc.) that MSNBC (a.k.a. “the liberal news channel”) trots out whenever someone challenges the U.S. empire somewhere in the world. This time it’s Iraqis, and of course Iran is to blame … because we seem to want war with Iran. That’s why whenever they talk about our opposition in Iraq, these Iraqis are termed “Iranian-backed militias” or “Iranian-backed extremists,” though they would never call the forces we fund and train “American-backed militias”. Yes, Iran has substantial influence in Iraq – they share a long border and a troubled history with Iraq, so it’s no surprise. We, on the other hand, come from the other side of ...

T’was the night before Wednesday, and all through the house not a minion was haunting, not even the louse … who lives upstairs. And this isn’t a house, it’s a freaking mill. Anything else? Hah. So much for seasonal poetry. Not my best effort, I’m afraid. Hope all is well in your part of the country at this festive time of year. Did racist uncle Bob come up from Montgomery County? Did he break the electric blinds in the dining room again? Thought so. He does that every year , for crying out loud. Then he starts crying out loud. And your pretty little Christmas goes up in flames. Not a sound around the holiday table; just the ticking of the grandfather clock. The ticking! THE TICKING! Whoa, THAT took a dark turn. My apologies. It’s kind of a subdued Christmas around the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill this year. Sure, we stand at the ready to fill 20th anniversary orders for our first album, 2000 Years To Christmas , a space odyssey. We’re anticipating order #1 … any day,...