Criminy. Is that you making that noise? What the fuck, Mitch, you nearly scared the fertilizer out of me! Put that bloody thing away, will you? Scientists!
Yeah, that’s right — I’m complaining again. So what’s new, right? Hey… you lock yourself into an abandoned hammer mill with an assortment of mad scientists, musicians, automatons, root vegetables, and extraterrestrials, and see where your head ends up. (On a pike, quite possibly.) You’ll be glad to know I’ve given up on the idea of pressing our own CD’s. (Too depressing.) But the spirit of scientific experimentation (sans animals) lives on here at the Cheney Hammer Mill. Unfortunately, where Mitch Macaphee is concerned, this usually involves some kind of explosion, whether intentional or not. Actually, most times not. It’s just that when you haphazardly drop a little of the blue liquid from beaker C into the 60 ml of yellow liquid in test tube 9, you may get a new kind of hair gel… or you may get a big kaboom (which can give you a new “do” just as quickly).
Nobody ever said music was a particularly safe occupation. Well, perhaps someone said it sometime, but they’re probably dead by now. Though I’m willing to wager that most suckers who go into pop or anti-pop music probably don’t expect to have to deal with hazardous materials or mad plans to control the future using a slightly modified VCR remote. Listen up, you children out there — if you want to be a rock 
musician, it goes with the territory. Don’t believe me? Talk to Marvin (my personal robot assistant). He’s got that kind of honest, open face that people tend to trust. What’s more, he’s hip, fly, keen, blah-zono, and can really talk to the young. Where was I going with this? Ah yes — he knows the scientific / technological hazards of the rock industry because he himself is the product of an experiment… a creature of Mitch Macaphee, a.k.a. Mr. Explosion.
I guess the thing to remember here is… hmmm. I appear to have forgotten. So many things to keep track of here at the mill, you know. Why only yesterday, some local merchant was trying to drum up a little extra business by commandeering Trevor James Constable’s orgone generating 
device and using it as a slide projector. Next thing we know, the son of a bitch lights a bonfire in the street right in front of the freaking mill, and starts handing out hotdogs and marshmallows on a stick. You would think that such irresponsible behavior as this might only draw the attention of the local fire brigade, but in fact, there were some gawkers. I’m a bit ashamed to say that Marvin was prominent among them (though, in all fairness, he was only there for the marshmallows). Suffice to say it took several hours to clear the sidewalk and drag the orgone generating device back into its cubby hole.
Which brings me back to science (see — there was a point to this story). If it weren’t for those pesky scientists, we wouldn’t have to deal with situations like this… at least, not on weekdays. Lock that sucker down, Trevor James!
unremarkable a leader as he was, he seems like a freaking prince compared to the current numbskull-in-chief. (Who wouldn’t? Reagan? Polk? William Henry Harrison?) I had to laugh this week when it was announced that Ford had expressed his contempt for the war in Iraq in a recorded interview with Bob Woodward that was embargoed for release until after Ford’s death. So even as Bush tried to glom onto Ford’s relative popularity as an ex (and essentially forgotten) president, the guy was dropping a bomb on him from beyond the grave. Ouch! Dubya’s becoming more than a bit like that Bifflestick guy in Li’l Abner who always had a dark cloud over his head.
Devil’s in the details. Still, even with all that, Ford’s brief tenure seems statesmanlike in retrospect, at least by U.S. standards. But how much praise can we heap upon a president — or anyone, for that matter — for what he didn’t do? Is absence of a vice a virtue? Is Ford a man of integrity because he didn’t trash the Constitution, the Geneva Conventions, and a raft of international treaties all in a row? Is Ford to be honored because he didn’t order illegal surveillance of Americans or authorize the detention and torture of individuals on the basis of secret evidence (or lack of same)? Is Ford a Lincoln because he didn’t start a major war on patently false pretenses by knowingly deceiving the American public? Perhaps all in politics is relative… or maybe it’s like that old Richard Farina title: we’ve been down so long, it looks like up to us.
Put it all in one stack. That’s right. Now step down hard. Harder. Harder still. Good, good. Nope, that’s too hard. Too hard, damnit! I said too fucking… oh, what the hell’s the use?
My apologies. Back to our story. What was I trying to accomplish, exactly? Well, as you know, we denizens of the Big Green franchise are pretty much left to our own devices when it comes to producing, publishing, and distributing our wares. Crikey, we have to make all our own noises, play our own horn parts, bang the drum (slowly), mix our own bloody songs, press our own CD’s, design our own labels… even build our own customers, like Marvin (my personal robot assistant) who owns all of our albums. (Okay, so there’s only one so far. There’ll be others!) That’s what makes us, well… different. Is that the word I’m looking for? Or is it… stupid? Has a more familiar ring. Anyway, we are the DTY band, for sure, and that requires a broad range of skills with which we have only a passing acquaintance, at best. And as one of the primary decision makers in the group (I’m the decider!), I’m tasked with training foot soldiers like the man-sized tuber (though, technically, he’s a root soldier).
Yup, last week it was moving the mill around to find the best reverb chamber effect. This week, we’ve been working on our process for pressing our own CD’s. Pretty simple process, from what I understand. Here’s how it works: you take the “music”, which is essentially a physically intangible entity, shape it into a ball, place it on a blank compact disc, and press down just as hard as you can until the two objects become one. Foolishly simple, right? So here’s the question — why the hell can’t the man-sized tuber do it? I keep handing him disc after disc, and he applies his mighty bulk, to no avail. The disc remains blank, lifeless, empty… like a vacant house on a deserted street in a forgotten country… (sounds like home to me). Perhaps I’m being too hard on the tuber. Perhaps I’m not shaping the intangible ball of music in exactly the right manner. (It’s actually harder than it sounds… not the music, but the technique… or as Matt would say, “techy neeky”.)
making the same kinds of noises. It’s what they consider political expedience, as the conventional wisdom suggests that no one in America wants to take responsibility for this “catastrofuck”, as Jon Stewart calls it; that defeat is always an orphan; that no politician can succeed by being the bearer of bad news, even if it is the truth. Now that Iraqis are dying in the hundreds of thousands, our “leaders” are encouraging us to weasel our way out of our obligations as an occupying power and a nation that has committed an extremely grave breach of international law. This phenomenon includes people like Democratic presidential hopeful Tom Vilsack, who speaks of breaking the Iraqi’s “culture of dependency” on American power, applying the language of self-help to a major conflagration for which we are primarily responsible. (What… is this some kind of co-dependent abusive relationship?)
Evidently, there’s still plenty of neocon Kool-Aid to go around in our nation’s capital. Dubya himself is getting, if anything, more bizarre than ever in his various public appearances, this week lurching from the possibility of defeat to the certainty of victory. Dick Cheney described his former mentor Rumsfeld as the finest secretary of defense America has ever had — a comment even Bill Kristol thought was over the top (and he’s obviously out of his mind to the point where he apparently thinks this is the only time Cheney’s been wrong about anything). Meanwhile, over on PBS, Condi “supertanker” Rice was talking about how Syria could stop destabilizing Iraq anytime they want by simply not allowing weapons and fighters to enter via their border. I mean, that just has to be destined for some kind of world-class irony award. What a bunch of freaks! How could even our own flabbergastingly credulous media take anything they say at face value? Even so, I think the handwriting is finally on the wall for this war, as a substantial portion of the permanent establishment is slowly beginning to catch up with the super-majority of Americans that thinks this is a hopeless mess.
Oh, hello. Didn’t see you there. Big Zamboola (or “Zamby”, as I’ve been calling him lately) was just helping me with at little household chore, to wit, moving the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill a few paces to the left. Yes, I did say household chore — Zamboola holds the house and I tell him where to plunk it. (Insert derisive laughter here.) Why move the august mill from one place to another very similar place? Well, it’s complicated, as you might expect. It’s a topic that twists and snakes around back on itself, ties itself in knots, squealing all the way, like most everything in the life of Big Green. Not sure you want to get into it on such a lovely day as this. Weather sucks where you are? Well, then — let’s have at it… or as my illustrious brother used to say, pass the fucking potatoes.
called “computer technology”. Don’t think it will catch on, frankly, though Marvin (my personal robot assistant) is all over that shit like a cheap robot. I digress… one major drawback of this amazing aural effects technology is that it costs money, and as you know, money does not grow on trees around here. No, they don’t call us “Big Green” for the contents of our wallets, my friends. Anyway, we have long since resigned ourselves to using the old ways of recording — time-honored techniques for adding verve and dimension to our records. (For definitions of “verve” and “dimension”, check your local library or record shop.)
you suppose we use to get the same effect, eh? Got a great big brick building here. Got one next door. What the fuck — Johnny White said, “Why the hell don’t we just bounce the sound around between ’em?” and I had no good answer for him. So we set it up, but I’ll be god-damned, the echo was just too damn short. What to do? “Well, that’s easy,” said Mitch Macaphee, “make the space between the buildings bigger… only not too much bigger.” Then what we needed was a sky hook with a whole lot of heft — that’s Big Zamboola all over. Only trouble is, his sense of direction is not all that it should be.
on a limb here and predict that Dubya’s dramatic conclusion will be — wait for it! — send more troops. Yes, the “surge” strategy so beloved of John McCain and Hillary Clinton. Just what the voters so clearly demanded, eh? This makes sense, I’m sure, in Bush’s tiny mind for several reasons. 1.) He’s the decider. Nobody’s going to tell him (and Cheney) what to do in Iraq, especially not a bunch of aging minders (sent by poppa Bush) whose opinions differ from the original pair of aging minders Dubya brought with him to Washington nearly six long years ago. 2.) Sending more troops makes the Democrats look bad, since they were sent to Washington to do just the opposite, and I’m sure Bush assumes they don’t have the spine to force him into withdrawal. 3.) It’s like “stay the course”… only better, so he gets to cling to his thread of consistency while looking like he’s doing something new and being “tough”, all at the same time — a win / win / win. 
One thing that is clearly indicated by the Iraq Study Group plan and the “Extension and Acceleration” (i.e. escalation) plan for which Bush now has a boner is that those at the center of power have not abandoned their core goals in Iraq, most significantly that of maintaining a long-term (perhaps permanent) military presence in that country, as well as substantial influence over its political and economic affairs. Among the ISG’s 79 recommendations (all of which the group claims must be implemented) is one that focuses on privatization of Iraq’s oil industry. Just this week the Iraqi parliament introduced legislation to allow exploration and development of petroleum resources by foreign contractors, an unprecedented move towards the kind of neoliberal economic model now being rejected in South America. I think that, once again, people are missing the central story here. The objective of the Iraq project is not to produce a democratic Iraq at peace with its neighbors as the administration suggests; it is to secure an Iraq that is amenable to U.S. military, political, and economic penetration. If that can be accomplished through the establishment of a secure democracy, it’s fine by Bush and company, but that’s by no means a requirement (see: Pakistan).
Hasta la vista, whatever that means. Let’s see you daaaaance, sucka! No? Okay, how about, put your hands together! All the girls. Now all the guys. Now just the left side of the room. Now the right! Okay, now just the one-armed Methodists with gingivitis. Great, great….
What was the outcome of Mitch’s grand experiment, you ask? The experiment that deprived us of essential personnel during one of the most critical points in the production of our new album? The experiment that necessitated gross extensions of our own menial responsibilities in and around the mill? That experiment??? Well, let me tell you. It was a success… a screaming success… if the intention was to make it rain incessantly for the past week and a half. I’m not at all sure that was the mission when the Zamboola-powered balloon left the ground, but it morphed into that somewhere just above the troposphere. And Marvin, good soldier that he is, refused to leave until the mission was accomplished. No cutting and running for him, my friend. (Also, he had no idea how to land that sucker, so that contributed to his stick-to-it-iveness. )
So now the rain is pouring in, filling up every crack and cranny in this creaky old mill, turning the streets into rivers and the rivers into moving lakes. Yesterday our replica J-2 spacecraft just floated away, its makeshift mast still crammed through the glass globe on the top of its hull. The basement is flooded, and the man-sized tuber has begun to resemble something recently yanked out of a mangrove swamp. (He’s growing knees, like a cypress tree. Very odd.) Trevor James Constable has secured some sort of floatation device for his patented orgone generating machine — god forbid that should ever get waterlogged. Why, you ask? Well, I’ll tell you. Time itself might become unglued. We could find ourselves running backwards through days, months, years, even decades before that contraption dries out. Want to shed years off your face, figure, physique, etc.? Pray for rain. Beat the drum like war. ‘Nuff said.
and diplomatic experts of every stripe are hitting the airwaves talking about “phased redeployment” and “force protection”, but, perhaps most remarkably, there is now a broad acknowledgement that a) this war is a disaster growing worse by the day, and b) we are losing. Like the 9-11 commission, though, this group was tasked with focusing on the “what the hell do we do now?” more than the “wha’ hoppen?” of Operation Iraqi Fiefdom. There is no accountability assessment in this charge, and with good reason. Many of the people who cooked up this splendid little war are still in office and are unwilling to play the “blame game”… especially since they are, well, to blame.
Now Baker, Hamilton, Joe Frank, and Reynolds (whoops — wrong group) have submitted a recommendation to begin what looks like a pullout but is actually a relatively long-term commitment to leave behind thousands of U.S. troops as military trainers and special strike forces in a country where they are almost universally despised. This is basically “Vietnamization” — getting Iraqis to do our hopeless fighting for us, while we work on salvaging some part of the actual American project in Iraq — that of establishing a permanent U.S. presence in the heart of the world’s most productive oil-producing region. Not quite the same as “stealing their oil” (though we’re happy to help favored firms do that via privatization of Iraqi oil fields), this has been a central goal of U.S. planners since our expulsion from Iran. Saudi Arabia is too sensitive to support a large-scale U.S. military presence, and though we’ve got staging areas in Kuwait and Qatar, the plan is to secure Iraq as a political-military client state — crucially, one that possesses massive oil reserves relied upon by our major economic competitors in Europe and the Far East. So I guess the message to our troops is, “Sorry, folks — it wouldn’t be a rapture if someone didn’t get left behind.”
Greetings, web crawlers of all descriptions. I’m afraid you’ve caught me once again in the midst of a work-related crisis — trying to adapt to new, cheap equipment here in the bowels of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill where we maintain our makeshift production studio. This time it’s headphones (I keep breaking the bloody things — damnable nuisance!); before that it was mic stands. We had those old, chrome piping jobs and the twisty friction-grip thingy wore out on them (and I apologize for using technical jargon on you). Ever try to sing into a moving microphone? Not recommended. In any case, we found it necessary to visit our local music recycling yard to see if we could find some adequate replacements. Never been to one? Beats the hell out of internet shopping, I can tell you. 
like much to you, but trust me — the incessant running back and forth between the “live” room and the control room can get pretty maddening. Then there are all of the Marvin-esque chores I’ve had to commandeer, like sweeping the beds and making the floors (not sure I’ve got that quite right yet), manning the night watch, bribing the local tax collector (for the privilege of paying our taxes — another story entirely), pretzel-bending, and the like. And now this… this is the final indignity. Marvin has always been our runner, our go-fer, our step-and-fetch-it, our get-it-the-fuck-over-here-or-die, etc. And frankly, I’m not the right person to take over that job. I’ve never been any good at telling myself what to do. (Where to go, yeah, but not what to do.)
has successfully completed his experiment in turning waffles to platinum. That’s right, friends — solid platinum, the metal that used to send Dr. Smith into great greed-soaked reveries. Mitch is truly the master of alchemy. Funny thing is, the device he created that does this miraculous transformation looks like, well, a toaster. You just put the waffles down, wait about a minute, and up pops the precious metal. Fact is, I mistook it for a real toaster a couple of days ago and nearly put my teeth out on a solid bar of platinum. (Platinum’s actually pretty good with a helping of blueberry syrup and a couple of strips of fried cadmium on the side. Mmmmmmm-boy!) 
The guy has, more than any other ex-president in living memory, distinguished himself through his philanthropic work, earning the Nobel Peace Prize and the admiration of many. Rather than being content to settle back on his laurels and enjoy retirement, he has instead chosen to wade hip deep into one of the most acrimonious political issues going — the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Carter is using his considerable prestige to gain a broad public hearing for what has long been the international consensus solution for that conflict, namely the end of Israeli rule over that less than one-quarter of mandate Palestine they’ve occupied since June 1967. He has also shone a light on the Palestinian experience in a way that is seldom (if ever) seen on U.S. television.
Then there’s Amadinejad. What a gift to Israeli and American hawks that man is! His ludicrous fulminations provide them with the ammunition they need to maintain perpetual military confrontation. And the best part about him is that he doesn’t even run Iran. He is as powerless as Khatami was before him, subject to the will of Iran’s supreme clerical leader, the Ayatollah Khamenie. So he presents a pretty low-grade threat to any state that possesses enough conventional and non-conventional weapons to reduce the region to rubble. Add to that the fact that Israel’s politicians (to say nothing of their U.S. counterparts) regularly threaten Iran with attack, and it should come as no surprise that Iran might contemplate building their own nuclear deterrent (though it appears this remains in the contemplative stage at present). With his observations about the Palestinians, Carter is trying to defuse the bomb that is the modern Middle East… and as a result, he will no doubt be lumped together with the bomb-throwers.