Hammer Mill Days

  Hey, I heard the regulations have changed. So you can take the damn thing off, now. That’s right, it came down just a few days ago. Some dude in a tie said so. So this is from the suits, man. What do you mean that’s weak sauce? I’m hip, dude, I’m hip! Oh, man … why does everything have to end up in an argument around this place? Something to do with the atmosphere here inside the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted home. It gets a little stuffy, especially in the warmer months, and that contributes to a kind of contagious psychosis. I’m not a doctor, of course, but I play one on the internet, and where I come from, this is a bad thing! Old news is good news Anyway, we get our news a little bit late here in this forgotten corner of the world. We’re only now hearing that the COVID regulations in New York have been relaxed , and we can start dropping the mask when we’ve gotten our vaccinations worked out. (And we did, by the way – the shots were fre...

The Biden administration has essentially balked on its Cuba policy, saying through its State Department spokesperson that they are reviewing the policy set by their grisly predecessors and that they will, in essence, get back to us. Meanwhile, the people of Cuba are slowly dangling in the breeze, still under sanction from the global superpower 90 miles to the north, no relief in sight. I’m not surprised, inasmuch as this administration made no pretense of departing from the imperial line when they were trawling for votes last year. As I’ve mentioned many times, Biden’s campaign web site contained almost no foreign policy position papers, and the ones they did post were bank-shot policies related to some domestic concern. The utility of that strategy is obvious – for the left, there’s nothing to push back against; for the centrists and right-wing Democrats, if they fill in the blank with what’s in their heads, they won’t be far from wrong. Ned’s price It’s worth ...

  There it is again. See it? That white stuff, floating down from the sky to vex us. Why, Lord, why? I only just pulled the tarp off the hole in the roof last Saturday, and now this ! MITCH!! Sorry, folks. Didn’t mean to melt down all over the blog post. It’s this damnable weather that’s got me riled up. Freaking snow, coming down through the sky-wide gap in the roof of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, our adopted home. As it that isn’t bad enough, Anti-Lincoln is in the forge room making snowmen …. like a child ! So un-presidential. (Which, I suppose, is to be expected.) Everyone complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. Of course, not everyone can do anything about it, and what makes this April snow particularly frustrating is the knowledge that we have here amongst us someone who actually can control the weather. I’m referring, of course, to our esteemed mad science advisor Mitch Macaphee, who has toyed with atmospheric disturbances ...

It was another one of those moments that will be encoded in our memories, so that people will likely recall long into the future where they were when they heard the news. I know I won’t soon forget the sadness I felt, unexpectedly, when I heard that former police officer Derek Chauvin was convicted on all three counts. As with most important events, I learned about it from a television announcer while I was in another room, doing something else. My eyes started welling up, and I thought about George Floyd somehow looking down on this sorry society of ours from his perch in the afterlife, or his place in our memories, and smiling. I think the repeated replay of his terrible suffering, over and over through the course of the trial, left a mark on a lot of us, and for me it is a source of tremendous sadness to know that he had to endure such an awful death, so unjustly. In the shadow of that horrific act, the conviction is cold comfort, but I am glad that his family no...

  Here comes another one, hot off the presses. Just in time for the presidential election. Wait, what? When did that happen? Five months ago? I’ll be damned. Oh, hey there. Just plying our usual trade here in Big Green land. (For those of you listening to an audio version of this blog, I don’t mean Greenland’s big sister; I mean the land of Big Green, the indie rock combo from space. Or from time. From somewhere not here and now, suffice to say.) I’m guessing more than a few of you think we just while away the hours, conversing with the flowers here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, where flowers grow up through the cracks in the shop floor. Well, I hate to disillusion any of our legions of followers, but we are far more industrious than that, my friends – far more. (Someone on the internet once claimed we were the laziest band in music. I almost fell out of my string hammock when I heard that one.) Long-time listeners know that Big Green’s most rece...

This week, as you likely know, President Biden announced the planned withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Afghanistan, with the last ones leaving sometime before September 11, 2021. Mind you, that is not the anniversary of our invasion of Afghanistan, but rather the 20th anniversary of the attacks that we used as a justification to invade Afghanistan (not to mention the 48th anniversary of the overthrow of Salvador Allende, President of Chile, and the installment of the dictator Augusto Pinochet – another triumph of American foreign policy). As that date is a significant one in the annals of imperialism, I suppose it’s fitting that we should choose it to mark the end our occupation of Afghanistan, assuming we actually go through with it this time. Let us not forget that Trump agreed to pull out by May of this year, and that the Biden team backed away from that. So … we’ll see. I (and I’m sure, you as well) have heard many, many voices over the past few days warning...

  Turn it down, the radio! No, that’s too low. Now turn it up again. Ah, that’s perfect. What’s that you say? It’s not a radio? But it has dials and lights and noise comes out of it. This is strange. Oh, hi. I was just contemplating a new advance in audio science called the Eight Track Cartridge Player – a bold invention that enables you to copy a two-sided, long-playing record onto a medium that’s broken into four equal parts … so inevitably, one or more of the songs on the LP will be randomly broken in half somewhere in the middle. Or there will be big unexplained periods of silence at various points on the album. Or both. That IS a step up. Now if we could just get a record album onto some kind of medium that would allow us to play the whole thing from beginning to end without any of that nonsense, skip to another track instantaneously, fast forward, etc. Wait …. WHAT?? You know, the thing about living in an abandoned hammer mill is that you’re so isolated ...