Track it.

Hmmm… I know I left that lying around here somewhere. Ah, here it is. Not sure where I’m going without this little number.
No, it’s not my brain. It’s my list of songs. Sixty five songs and counting. Shoo-wee, right? That’s enough songs to fuel the enormous asbestos-clad boiler of the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill for a hundred years. (Well, that may be a slight exaggeration.) What was it I heard Lincoln (or anti-Lincoln) saying the other day? Oh, yeah. “A chicken’ll make you a meal… or it’ll lay enough eggs for a thousand breakfasts. A lamb - that’s about two weeks worth of mutton. Or you can have warm wool coats from now until doomsday…” That Lincoln- just brimming with frontier wisdom. (Actually, I think he borrowed that from Royal Dano in one of his more nefarious incarnations on The Big Valley, Lincoln’s favorite T.V. drama.)
Where was I again? Oh, right. The songs. Yeah, we have an enormous backlog of songs, some never recorded, many represented by the most rudimentary demos. Lot more Christmas material, true. Fact is, our first album - 2000 Years To Christmas - was just as selection of numbers from a vast body of ludicrous Christmas songs, mostly penned by that keee-razy brother of mine. Probably about fifty of those in total, though only about a dozen have made it onto our record/perform list as of yet. Intriguing, no? (No? Hmmmm. Is that your final answer? Want a life line?)
Sure, there’s that. Then there are the songs that are complete and yet still in the can, never released commercially. Mostly these are recordings that have no proper album to call home. They are made in the usual Big Green way - lay out a polymer disc, slather it full of mastic, add music and apply pressure… much pressure. Then toss. Well… we tossed them a little too far, perhaps, and no one has had the energy to go and pick them up. Those will likely see the light of day at some point, though I don’t know exactly when. (Let me consult with my fellow nut cases and get back to you.)
Speaking of nut cases and music, an old friend of mine shared a champion little number with us the other day. Enjoy, campers!
all. Well, that may work for bread. I’m not so sure about anything else. I mean, if you need a car, and you ask your spouse to go out and find one for you, and s/he comes back with one axle, a steering wheel, three tires, and a seized engine, you still are not going anywhere. Same deal, it seems to me, with health care. For all the cautionary comments about “not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good,” we really do not have a whole car here, so far as I can see. For one thing, they stripped out the most popular provisions, namely, the public option and Medicare expansion - features that would benefit people immediately, save money, and make for a much more reasonable system.
Well, let me tell you why. Because too many people would opt for it. That doesn’t work for the money-drenched cretins that the insurance companies have sent to Washington to represent us. I’m afraid I have to include my own congressman, Michael Arcuri, in that number. He has thrown up his hands on health care, and while I wouldn’t blame him for not supporting the Senate bill, he should join with progressives in trying to pass some reasonable version that has a strong public option. They put the scare into him, and the insurance lobby is buying lots of T.V. time in our market telling people to call Arcuri and have him vote against the bill (which, ironically, he has already said he will do). Don’t just sit there and vote no, Mike - pull together with some of your colleagues and make it better.
Oh well. While we’re trying to figure out what’s going on there… What’s been happening here at the mill? Usual stuff. Keeping the roof on, as they say, and the fridge stocked with lunchables. (Or, at least, snackables.) You have to be versatile to please the mix of tastes we have around this joint. Take Lincoln (please). Now, he’s a fan of chicken fricassee. Of course, being a vegetarian, I won’t have anything to do with the stuff, but that doesn’t stop him. He keeps putting it on the shoplifting… I mean, the shopping list. And I keep coming back with tofu. (He’s no happier now than he was in 1863.)
too heavy, we try making an alloy by blending it with some more light-hearted material. Failing that, we scrap the sucker. Perhaps the constituent parts will come in handy (they sometimes go into making a first-rate pedal bike).
in Somalia facing possible war crimes prosecution in the United States (where he now resides). Some of his torture victims now live in the U.S. as well, and would like to get some justice. Fair enough. While the correspondent took the time to describe how heinous that regime was, she neglected to mention the fact that our government had sent them something like $1 billion over the Carter, Reagan, and Bush I years. Small detail.
Perhaps it’s unfair of me to single out NPR. I just guess I’m getting annoyed with hearing Jim DeMint, Judd Gregg, or some other “conservative” leading light every time I tune in. On Thursday I got to hear from a Democrat…. Bart Stupak. Who’s running Washington again? (Oh, yes. On Wednesday, during the “Political Junkie” segment of “Talk of the Nation”, there was an extended conversation with Mitt Romney, a.k.a. Guy Smiley, a.k.a. Bush redux.) Meanwhile, the daughter of our own Karadzic is reviving McCarthyism with a web commercial attacking what she terms “The Al Qaeda Seven” in the Obama justice department. So not only does the war criminal brag of his guilt in plain sight, but his spawn is somehow treated as possessed of some expertise by virtue of her father’s ill deeds.
What was that sound I heard, coming from down below? Some kind of tectonic activity? A passing subway car? Or could it be….. a tuber in distress?
random, stupid detail about people’s personal lives of interest to no one other than themselves. We are certainly guilty of that. Yeah, I know the standard jibe. Big Green is all yak and very little music, right? Well…. right enough. Too much talking, not enough music - got it. And it’s been almost a year and a half since our last release, International House. So what the hell - time to get off our sorry butts and start strumming, pounding, screeching again.
them AND play them live. And what the hell - let’s do a powerpoint, besides. Matt and I have been knocking our heads together, and we’ve started laying down some tracks with Marvin (when he’s available) recording reference drums until John White returns from his extended trip to Madagascar. (Where do you rent a gas car in Madagascar?) The virtual reels are rolling… that’s what that freaking noise is.
comprehensive health insurance reform? Never. Rebuild the entire thing to suit them, and they’ll still vote against it purely for spite. The problem here is, of course, the democrats themselves, who can’t seem to recognize when they’ve got something that’s both popular and worth defending. I’m referring to the public option, Medicare expansion, and other measures denounced as “socialism” by the other side (and conservative dems) but which the general public is strongly in favor of. The reason why people aren’t fired up about the current plan is that they stripped those measures out to please conservatives. Obama - congress - get a clue! Pass something that will make a real positive difference in people’s lives quickly, and they will support you.
The latest Afghan campaign continues unabated. I’ve heard the Taliban being accused of using civilians as human shields. Just a couple of weeks ago, though, the U.S. and local Afghan government leaders were encouraging people to stay in Marjah so that there would be someone to govern when they had taken over; and there have been reports of refugees being blocked from exiting by our military. Numerous civilians have been killed in what quickly became a war zone. How is this different?
Down and down and down we go, round and round and round we go… Ah, I forgot what comes next. Oh yeah - it’s either “ker-splash!” or “crunch!”
Dropping him into the crevice is like dropping a potato down a well. In fact, I don’t know why I’m using a simile - it IS dropping a potato down a well, waiting to hear the splash. I know what you’re thinking, but just remember… the man-sized tuber did nothing but oppress us as mayor of our little town, and so he owes us, in our estimation. (No, I don’t have a mouse in my pocket. I’m referring to the entire Big Green entourage.)
some ’splainin’ to do, as Tom Coburn said to Justice Sotamayor. Take, for instance, this little number by Matt called “Edward Teller”:
raising taxes, cutting popular programs, etc. That is, however, the main reason why they have been sent to Washington D.C. - to decide where the money for the federal government comes from and where it goes. If they are unable to grapple with these issues, they might consider applying for jobs at the corporations that paid for their campaigns. What irks me about the deficit reduction commission, aside from the participation of paleocons like Alan Simpson, is that they are not directly accountable to the electorate. Even more than that, commissions are usually mustered to do particularly dirty work, like cutting or privatizing Social Security to save a few bucks.
Death and Texas. Jesus christmas. No one likes paying taxes, or going to the dentist, or taking exams, or eating their Maypo (well…. almost nobody), but this software executive in Texas who flew his plane into an IRS building should have taken an anger management seminar or something stronger.
Oh, hi out there in TV land. Just attempting to plumb the depths of what has become a rather large rend in the garment of our adoptive home, the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill here in upstate New York. We’re just getting a preliminary read here, but I’d say this sucker goes down pretty far. Maybe to the center of the Earth (or, to use the term New York-based geoscientists commonly employ, the “oit”). In fact, I have some pretty good evidence that this crack goes straight through the nougat to the chewy center of our lively little planet. What evidence, you ask? The first-hand kind… as in robot hand… as in Marvin (my personal robot assistant), who volunteered to, well, dive down there and take a look.
technician - Marvin’s creator, Mitch Macaphee - and asked him to program into Marvin the willingness to volunteer for such a dangerous task, which Mitch did in a trice. No problem for an experience mad scientist. There were a few glitches, of course - in essence, Marvin’s mouth was saying “I volunteer” but his legs were pedaling in the other direction. (Those magnetic-drive casters produce some torque, let me tell you.) That aside, we managed to get a rope around him, strap a flashlight to his forehead, put a cell phone in his claw, and lower him down into the abyss. Fortunately, Marvin’s eyes double as web cams, so we were able to see the underground landscape unfold before him - fascinating journey, as that Australian interior designer might say in a totally different context. Care for a Foster’s? (Product placement - hey, got to keep the lights on somehow, right?)
seventy-five, or even one hundred miles below us. But as far as I’m concerned, anything down there belongs to US. That’s right… a pie-slice shaped vector of earth stretching from the perimeter of the hammer mill down to the core of this planet - a colossal spike of mineral wealth - belongs to us, at least as far as our new legal advisor Anti-Lincoln can tell. Yes, I know what you’re going to say… why, WHY would we consult someone as untrustworthy and disreputable as anti-Lincoln, the literal antithesis of our most revered president? A man with no scruples, no ethics… what kind of a lawyer could he possibly be? OUR kind.
mainstream media. This sometimes manifests itself in the form of stories that focus on a reporter’s experience rather than whatever that reporter is witnessing. (Gary Trudeau has offered an extreme example of this with his journalist character Roland Hedley and his perpetually inane Twitter feed.) There’s also the phenomenon of framing complex historical events as being largely the product of one person’s efforts. Probably the best example of this would be Reagan purportedly bringing down the Berlin Wall through the awesome power of speech. And there’s “Charlie Wilson’s War”, the namesake of which - former Texas representative Charlie Wilson - just passed away this week.
Whatever his role may have been in providing fuel to the Afghan war effort during the 1980s, this was not the work of one man, any more than the fall of the Berlin Wall was the result of one speech. This ongoing crisis was many, many years in the making, beginning in earnest with the Carter administration and the decision to begin backing the fundamentalist factions within Afghanistan because it was felt that they would prove a longer-term, more pernicious problem for the Soviets than any secularist elements. Money began flowing on a larger scale in the Reagan years as the CIA embarked on what was up to that time the largest operation in their history, conducted in cooperation with the Pakistani ISI and the Saudis. Fanatical fighters were recruited all over the Muslim world, including most notably Osama bin Laden and his cohorts. So we all had a piece of this one, and now it’s got a piece of us.