Aw, tubey… what do you want to go and do that for? Put it down, tubey… put it down. Owwww! Not there — that’s my freaking skull, you cruciferous moron!

Ah, yes… there you are. Welcome. As you can see by the banner head (oh, say, can you see the banner head?), your belov’d “Notes from Sri Lanka” has been re-christened (or more properly speaking, re-agnosticized) “Hammer Mill Days” — just one component in our year-long rebranding project. Ahem… did I just say that? Can’t have been me. I must have been channeling our publicist from Loathsome Prick records — the one who keeps insisting that we re-brand ourselves as some kind of contemporary country or aging emo band (yuk!). Fucker put one of those Bluetooth antennae in my head while I was sleeping, so every once in a while I pop out with his latest PR drivel.

Just to keep you straight on who’s saying what, I’ll just put all the publicist’s words in some other color… like maroon, say. Maroon is so last year! Yeah, that will work nicely.

All right, now that I’ve dealt with him, let’s get back to you. You may be wondering, What the fuck are they doing now? Why change the name at this advanced stage of pointlessness? Well, with the help of Marvin (my personal robot assistant) and the man sized tuber (who won’t put that hammer down), your friends in Big Green have prepared the following brief Q&A:

Q: What the fuck are you doing now?

A: Specifically, scratching my left earlobe. But more to the point, we’re changing the name of this blog to better serve you, our valued customers… or not, depending on who you trust. (Jesus, that’s annoying!) Actually, the truth is that we’ve gotten tired of explaining how Sri Lanka is not so much the place where we live (which, of course, it isn’t) as it was a clumsy attempt to make reference to our state of near-total obscurity as a band. Turns out a lot more of our readers/listeners know all about Sri Lanka than we gave them credit for. So we’ve settled on something more suitably obscure — an abandoned hammer mill in the middle of nowhere. That’s the ticket.

Q: Why “Hammer Mill Days” and not “Nut Butter Alley” or “Reflective Blister Times?”

A: Excellent question, Marvin. It’s all about branding, you see. No, no… Don’t listen to that asshole! It’s because the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill is the locus of all that is Big Green. And because “Nut Butter Alley” was already taken. (That other one, I’m not even going to comment on.)

Q: Why do you suck so bad?

A: Loaded question, but fair. I guess it’s because you say so, tubey. (He’s just pissed off because I haven’t watered him yet today.)

So anyway… there you have it. Big new name, same poor quality. Everything you expect out of your favorite Big Green blog… and more. We’ve even set up a mirror site at Blogspot so that you can check out our latest exploits without having to surf all the way over to the hammer mill every time you want to hear from us. Isn’t that considerate of us? No, that’s elementary customer service. Arrggh… Loathsome Prick is certainly earning their label this week. Tubey — give me that goddamn hammer so I can knock that pernicious Bluetooth receiver out of my skull. I’ll get the freaking water, okay? Tubey!!

Aw, c’mon Mitch! You’ve got at least three electron microscopes to your name. Can’t we just use one of them for our experiment? One little one?

Damn these scientists and their ethical codes of conduct! Yes, that’s right — I did indeed make reference to ethics and Mitch Macaphee in the same sentence. Far be it from me to ever suggest that our resident mad doctor (or as you say, “daktari“) has constrained himself to purely ethical behavior through the course of his long and spotted career. No, no — I’m referring to this annoying internal code that scientists maintain between one another. It’s kind of like a secret handshake. In fact, with respect to Mitch and Trevor James Constable (another member of the scientific contingent here at the Cheney Hammer Mill), it is a secret handshake. (Honest — they really will not let us watch them shake hands. It’s kind of… unnatural…)

Why do we want to play with the shiny, pretty, candy-like electron microscope? Well, if you’ll recall last week’s episode (and there’s absolutely no reason in the universe why you should), the entire Big Green contingent was on a hunt for water. Potable water has become rather scarce here at the mill, what with the recent drought, earthquakes and sandstorms we’ve been experiencing. And then there’s that other thing… yeah, right. We haven’t paid the water bill in 18 months. That may have had something to do with it, as well. Anyway, there were several plans circulated, some of them involving divining rods (my idea), some involving acts of plant-like ingenuity (the man-sized tuber’s idea), some involving mayhem and hooliganism perpetrated against our unsuspecting neighbors (the evil anti-Lincoln’s brain child) — none of them seemed quite the thing. Then Marvin (my personal robot assistant) had one of his notions… and frankly, it was a cracker.

No, no — not that kind of cracker. And not Robbie Coltrane, either, so don’t even go there. I mean kind of a … well… not bad idea. You see, Marvin pulled a tiny fragment of knowledge out of one of his microscopic electronic brain units — it was something he read somewhere about a certain amount of water residing in every object, every cubic inch of air, every club sandwich. It may be an extremely minute amount of water (as in the case of the club sandwiches over at Bolanders’s deli… I swear, they’re made of real clubs!), but because it is everywhere, that water may amount to a significant amount… perhaps enough to fill a pool. If only we could see it. Ergo, electron microscope. Point the sucker at some water-bearing object (Lincoln), and start sponging it up. Simple, right?

Well… maybe it wasn’t such a good idea. I’d still like to borrow Mitch’s microscope. No particular reason. Well, there is one. Our neighbor is watching re-runs of Daktari, and we don’t have a telescope, so… you know…

Empty again, eh? Throw another bucket down there. Was that a ker-plunk I heard just then? No? Okay, okay. Dry as a bone, I guess. Saints preserve us… not that they have any reason to. What the hell — we’re not saints…

Pardon my mental meandering. We’re just working our way through another one of those “issues” (or what honest people call “pains in the ass”) that crop up from time to time when you’re squatting in an abandoned hammer mill. Don’t know if you’ve ever had the pleasure. Actually, it’s not that different from sleeping out in the road. Cold all winter, hot all summer. Every spring, a river runs through it. And now, because of the freak weather, we can’t find the water table. Now, before you ask how anyone could build a table out of water, let me just pre-empt you by saying that I do, in fact, mean the aquifer we draw upon for our sustenance. No, we haven’t paid the water bill — that takes money (or as Democratic fundraising consultant Chris Lehane puts it, “munnee”), something that is in short supply ’round this manor, squire.

We started dropping the bucket down our community well yesterday when Marvin (my personal robot assistant) dumped the last of our drinking water onto the mixing console. (Yes, Marvin is still having “issues”, even with his newly installed framistat. Lately he’s taken to wearing silly hats, but just don’t get me started on that subject…) All that came up was air. Not that air is unimportant — quite the contrary. I’ll tell you, if we were on Titan or Kaztropharius 137b, we would KILL for that air. No sir, there ain’t hardly a terrestrial rock band that understands the value of air better than we do. It’s just that, here on earth, we have no practical use for an air well. We expect water from the ground, damn it. We get no water, we get no where — simple as that. Little known fact: Big Green is more than 60% water. So, in essence, it’s as if one of us — John, say — were made of rock. Something to think about.

There have been a number of different views on how to satisfy our water needs — one view per squatter, in point of fact. Some have been a bit more aggressive in their thinking than others. Anti-Lincoln thought that we should take a three-pronged strategy that goes something like this:

1. Invade the neighboring row house
2. Kill neighbors
3. Steal precious water
4. Do primitive victory dance with punching fist motion (which he helpfully demonstrated)

Got that? Personally, I didn’t think much of that idea. (Neither did the local constables, who now have an APB out on our anti-matter emancipator friend.) Of course, that’s not the only suggestion that’s been turned in. The man-sized tuber, for instance, suggested we all send down tap roots to the aquifer. So, okay… what we need now is a solution that is somewhere between those two poles. Anyone? I’m getting thirsty over here…