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!!
And no, I don’t mean this project they call “Middle East democracy”, because that’s just some policy hack yammering. I mean the real Iraq project involving permanent U.S. bases in country and an Iraqi government compliant with (or at least sensitive to) our wishes. Something tells me that project will withstand a good many setbacks of the type that involve loss of life and limb, so long as those lives and limbs belong only to the relatively poor and poorly connected. It was with this goal in mind that our leaders insisted on starting this disastrous war back in March 2003, and if they’ve shown an element of regret over that decision during the last four years, I’ve missed it.
Imagine just for a moment that the Iraqis are not simple, ignorant people who have been waiting since the bronze age for us to come and grant them “freedom”. Imagine that people in the insurgency and folks like Moqtada al Sadr have a somewhat subtle understanding of their own national self-interest. Imagine, too, that they have been paying attention to U.S. policy in the region over the past half century… perhaps paying it greater attention than we ourselves have done. How can we expect that they would show any enthusiasm over our apparent intention to settle in for a good long stay? How can we think that they would willingly submit themselves to a government dominated by people who were living in exile prior to the arrival of U.S. forces in 2003? Do we really think that they will sit still while our armed forces (government-run and private) are in occupation of their country and our commercial sector lobbies for greater influence?
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? 
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. 
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?