Tag Archives: hammer mill

Usual Rubbish

Dawg days.

Things are heating up around here. Not surprising. I left the mansized tuber in charge of the thermostats. Bugger was born in a greenhouse, what the hell was I thinking?

Well, summer is upon us, friends. No, not summer by the calendar, but rather summer by the sweat of the brow. Or so it goes in the northern climes of the northern hemisphere, on that land mass known as “North America”, just below the mighty lake Ontario, maker of much snow in the darker months – a kind of ice goddess, if you will. (Hell, even if you won’t.) It doesn’t take much to raise the temperature in the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill – all that brick, you know, baking in the direct sunlight, no trees to protect us. It’s like spending a night in the box. Sure wish you stop trying to help me, Captain.

Okay, so… what’s my summer project going to be? Could be any of a number of things. As Big Green has no interstellar tour booked, I may play a few gigs with my old cover band, Putting On The Ritz (a.k.a. the only group with an audience that can put up with me for more than five gigs in a row). Well, that’s one thing. Another is to get a podcast going – a project Matt and I had started, then forgotten about, maybe six months ago. Could try that again. Then there’s all those recordings lying around either half-finished or just gathering dust. Summer might be a good time to sort through all that stuff.

Then there’s recording, of course. We could try that, for a change. Let’s not get crazy.

Matt’s been working on his Facebook posts from Spring Farm Cares – video postings and blog entries. Check it out. I’ve been liking it o-plenty. Now that’s a summer project, friends. Would that I could be that ambitious. About the best I can do is sit around strumming Ian Anderson songs on Matt’s battered 1978 Aspen six-string acoustic. Hey – set up a Web cam and there’s your podcast, buck. 

Hmmm. How many more problems can I solve sitting on my ass? Not sure. It’s TOR:CON 4 over here at the hammer mill. Batten down the hatches!

Usual Rubbish

Air break.

All right – give it back. It’s my turn to use the gas mask. More than ten minutes counts as a “bogart”, right? Fifteen minutes? All right…

Yes, more strife here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill, place of our birth, land of our fathers, and all the rest of it. What is Big Green up to this week? Gasping. Lots of gasping. As some of you may know (and many, I’m sure, don’t), May is the time of year when mad scientists tend to roll out all of their new world-destroying experiments. It’s in anticipation of the upcoming CrazyCom Mad Science Convention they hold in Madagascar every August. Everybody wants to show boat the new death ray, the improved zip gun, the killer robot, now with more sparks. Kind of a pissing match for high-tech cranks. Attend at your own risk. (The last one ended badly, I hear.)

Seriously, I hate this time of year. Mitch Macaphee always goes way over the top, trying to one-up the other mad scientists on the block (by “block”, they mean solar system… they’ve got a different name for everything). Last year it was an anti-gravity machine. I spent the better part of April sleeping on the ceiling. (And that was the better part.) The year before, some kind of trans-dimensional salad shooter, I believe – not his most ambitious endeavor, I must say. Close to ten years ago, he actually got an honorable mention for Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who Mitch built from odds and spares in his one-room lab back in old Jakarta.

It’s a bit hard to get into the spirit of this competition, especially when Mitch’s obsession is sucking all the air out of the room. That’s not a metaphor: he has invented a machine that sucks all the air out of a room. Don’t bother trying to work out the practical applications for such a device – he is a mad scientist. What part of mad scientist do you not understand? He’s cobbled together some kind of contraption that’s belching black smoke as we speak. John thought to tap our old militant neighbor, Gung-Ho, for some surplus gas masks, but he could only spare one. Hence, the ensuing competition.

Hmmmm… what do you think? Can we hold our breath until August? We shall see.

Political Rants

Obama’s twenty.

I dimly recall an old Chris Rock routine about Bill Clinton back in the 90’s. It was that bit about Bill Clinton being the first black president; Rock’s proof was simple: “He hands them a twenty, and they hold it up to the light.” That pretty much defines the dynamic that brought about this week’s revealing of Obama’s long-form birth certificate. There’s a clear effort towards delegitimizing the president not so much because of his policies (which merit some substantial criticism) but rather on the basis of his being black. No, Donald Trump is not standing there saying Obama shouldn’t be president because of his skin color. He is merely amplifying the overtly racist insistence that the man hasn’t adequately proven his identity, that he must – again and again, in an ever-proliferating variety of forms – present his papers on demand. When has this ever in our lifetimes been demanded of a president of the United States?

This started with the Clinton campaign and was expanded by the McCain campaign with the ominous warnings from both halves of that ticket that Obama was “not like you and me.” True enough, if “you and me” is white people. It was the birth certificate, the church he belonged to, the African garb he wore on a trip, the middle name his parents gave him – all these attempts to make him appear alien and, therefore, threatening to middle America. (No need to enhance the fear factor on the far right- they were there already.) For the most part, it’s really just a process of drawing people’s attention to the fact that he’s African American, by subtracting the “American” part.

Stephen Colbert did a decent job of explaining this – hilariously – on his show this past week. (I think it was Wednesday night’s show.) Of course, Obama’s effort to still the beast by giving it something to chew on is a bit like paying off blackmailers. And sure enough, they’re already on to the next thing.

Got to go – papers to write. (End of the semester again.)

luv u,

jp